Collected Stories Read online

  Wallace Stegner

  COLLECTED STORIES

  Contents

  Foreword by Wallace Stegner

  COLLECTED STORIES

  The Traveler

  Buglesong

  Beyond the Glass Mountain

  The Berry Patch

  The Women on the Wall

  Balance His, Swing Yours

  Saw Gang

  Goin’ to Town

  The View from the Balcony

  Volcano

  Two Rivers

  Hostage

  In the Twilight

  Butcher Bird

  The Double Corner

  The Colt

  The Chink

  Chip off the Old Block

  The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples

  The Blue-Winged Teal

  Pop Goes the Alley Cat

  Maiden in a Tower

  Impasse

  The Volunteer

  A Field Guide to the Western Birds

  Something Spurious from the Mindanao Deep

  Genesis

  The Wolfer

  Carrion Spring

  He Who Spits at the Sky

  The City of the Living

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  COLLECTED STORIES

  Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was born in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of Scandinavian immigrants, he travelled with his parents and brother all over the West – to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana and Wyoming – before settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Many of the landscapes he encountered in his peripatetic youth figure largely in his work, as do characters based on his stern father and athletic, outgoing brother. Stegner graduated from university in Utah in 1930, and subsequently received a master’s and a doctoral degree from the University of Iowa. He married Mary Stuart Page in 1934, and for the next decade the couple followed Wallace’s teaching career – to the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and eventually to Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program, and where he was to remain until his retirement in 1971.

  Stegner’s first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993, he had published some two dozen works of fiction, history, biography and essays. Among his many literary prizes were the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other notable works include The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), A Shooting Star (1961), Wolf Willow (1962), All the Little Live Things (1967), Recapitulation (1979), Crossing to Safety (1987) and the Collected Stories (1990), all of which are available in Penguin Modern Classics.

  For Mary, in gratitude for

  fifty-three years of close

  collaboration, and for

  patience beyond the call of duty

  Foreword

  It would not be accurate to say that these stories gathered up near the end of a lifetime of writing constitute an autobiography, even a fragmentary one. I have tried autobiography and found that I am not to be trusted with it. I hate the restrictiveness of facts; I can’t control my impulse to rearrange, suppress, add, heighten, invent, and improve. Accuracy means less to me than suggestiveness; my memory is as much an inventor as a recorder, and when it has operated in these stories it has operated almost as freely as if no personal history were involved.

  Nevertheless the thirty-one stories in this volume do make a sort of personal record. I lived them, either as participant or spectator or auditor, before I made fictions of them. Because I have a tyrannous sense of place, they are laid in places that I know well—many of them in Saskatchewan, where I spent my childhood, and in Salt Lake City, where I misspent my youth, and in California, where I have lived for forty-five years, and in Vermont, where I have spent at least part of the last fifty summers. I have written about the kind of people I know, in the places where I have known them. If art is a by-product of living, and I believe it is, then I want my own efforts to stay as close to earth and human experience as possible—and the only earth I know is the one I have lived on, the only human experience I am at all sure of is my own.

  Any reasonably long life, looked back upon, irresistibly suggests a journey. I see these stories, inventions on a base of experience, as rest stops, pauses while I tried to understand something or digest some action or clarify some response. As a journey, my life has covered a good part of the twentieth century, and it has been quintessentially American, though it could not now be reproduced: childhood on a belated and benighted frontier, youth in a provincial capital, maturity with the whole confused world to run in. And along with the expansion of my physical universe, a corresponding social and intellectual expansion; for as a child I knew little beyond the atomic, migrant western family that pursued an American dream already over for almost everyone else, and pursued it sometimes beyond the boundaries of the law. I had a long way to go, and the faster I traveled, the faster the world rolled under me and the further I got from the primitive, deprived, barren, lawless, and sometimes idyllic condition from which I started.

  But few lives take the shortest distance between two points. Certainly mine did not. It backed and filled and lost the way and found it and lost it again. The traveler, moreover, has been largely created by the conditions of his beginning, and retains the tastes, prejudices, and responses that the early stages have bred into him. That is why I have made no attempt to arrange these stories so that they make a nice progression from simplicity to complexity, past to present, primitive to civilized, sensuous to intellectual. They lie as they fell, perhaps because I don’t believe there is any clear progression to illustrate, or that this journey has any clear destination.

  Because the individual stories were written over a span of many years, and because many of them, especially the Saskatchewan stories, look back twenty years or more from the time when they were written, and because the world and I were changing at an ever-accelerating rate, some stories reflect events, social attitudes, and even diction that now seem dated. (For instance, the boy Johnny Bane in “Pop Goes the Alley Cat,” written just after World War II, is referred to as a Negro, not a Black, because Negro is what he was when I wrote the story.) I could have written that sort of thing out of the stories, and changed social and sexual attitudes, and altered dialogue, only at the cost of a fabric that had been carefully woven in another time.

  I have not written a short story for many years. It seems to me a young writer’s form, made for discoveries and nuances and epiphanies and superbly adapted for trial syntheses. Increasingly, in my own writing, the novel has tended to swallow and absorb potential stories. (Bernice Baumgarten, my first agent, who handled all my early stories, used to say that a short-story writer lives on his principal, using up beginnings and endings.) Whether because of a shortage of beginnings and endings or for other reasons, I found fairly early that even stories begun without the intention of being anything but independent tended to cluster, wanting to be part of something longer. That is why several stories written and first published as stories were later cannibalized and used as chapters in The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Recapitulation and Wolf Willow. I have juggled these back to their original state and let them fall as randomly into this collection as they fell into Harper’s or Atlantic or some other magazine in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. In their independent form, they actually mark the traveler’s route better than they do as segments of longer books.

  WALLACE STEGNER

  Greensboro, Vermont

  September 7, 1989

  The Traveler

  He was rolling in the first early dark down a snowy road, his headlights pinched between dark walls o
f trees, when the engine coughed, recovered, coughed again, and died. Down a slight hill he coasted in compression, working the choke, but at the bottom he had to pull over against the three-foot wall of plowed snow. Snow creaked under the tires as the car eased to a stop. The heater fan unwound with a final tinny sigh.

  Here in its middle age this hitherto dependable mechanism had betrayed him, but he refused to admit immediately that he was betrayed. Some speck of dirt or bubble of water in the gas line, some momentary short circuit, some splash of snow on distributor points or plug connections—something that would cure itself before long. But turning off the lights and pressing on the starter brought no result; he held the choke out for several seconds, and got only the hopeful stink of gasoline; he waited and let the flooded carburetor rest and tried again, and nothing. Eventually he opened the door and stepped out onto the packed snow of the road.

  It was so cold that his first breath turned to iron in his throat, the hairs in his nostrils webbed into instant ice, his eyes stung and watered. In the faint starlight and the bluish luminescence of the snow everything beyond a few yards away swam deceptive and without depth, glimmering with things half seen or imagined. Beside the dead car he stood with his head bent, listening, and there was not a sound. Everything on the planet might have died in the cold.

  Indecisively seeking help, he walked to the top of the next rise, but the faintly darker furrow of the road blurred and disappeared in the murk, the shadows pressed inward, there was no sign of a light. Back at the car he made the efforts that the morality of self-reliance demanded: trying to see by the backward diffusion of the headlamps, he groped over the motor, feeling for broken wires or loose connections, until he had satisfied himself that he was helpless. He had known all along that he was.

  His hands were already stung with cold, and around his ankles between low shoes and trouser cuffs he felt the chill like leg irons. When he had last stopped, twenty miles back, it had been below zero. It could be ten or fifteen below now. So what did he do, stranded in mid-journey fifty miles or more from his destination? He could hardly go in for help, leaving the sample cases, because the right rear door didn’t lock properly. A little jiggling swung it open. And all those drugs, some of them designed to cure anything—wonder drugs, sulfas, streptomycin, Aureomycin, penicillin, pills and anti-toxins and unguents—represented not only a value but a danger. They should not be left around loose. Someone might think they really would cure anything.

  Not quite everything, he told the blue darkness. Not a fouled-up distributor or a cranky coil box. Absurdly, there came into his mind a fragment of an ancient hymn to mechanical transport:

  If she runs out of dope, just fill her up with soap

  And the little Ford will ramble right along.

  He saw himself pouring a bottle of penicillin into the gas tank and driving off with the exhaust blowing happy smoke rings. A mock-heroic montage of scientific discovery unreeled itself—white-coated scientists peering into microscopes, adjusting gauges, pipetting precious liquids, weighing grains of powder on minuscule scales. Messenger boys sped with telegrams to the desks of busy executives. A group of observers stood beside an assembly line while the first tests were made. They broke a car’s axle with sledges, gave it a drink of the wonder compound, and drove it off. They demolished the carburetor and cured it with one application. They yanked loose all the wires and watched the same magic set the motor purring.

  But here he stood in light overcoat and thin leather gloves, without overshoes, and his car all but blocked the road, and the door could not be locked, and there was not a possibility that he could carry the heavy cases with him to the next farm or village. He switched on the headlights again and studied the roadside they revealed, and saw a rail fence, with cedars and spruces behind it. When more complex gadgets and more complex cures failed, there was always the lucifer match.

  Ten minutes later he was sitting with the auto robe over his head and shoulders and his back against the plowed snowbank, digging the half-melted snow from inside his shoes and gloating over the growing light and warmth of the fire. He had a supply of fence rails good for an hour. In that time, someone would come along and he could get a push or two. In this country, in winter, no one ever passed up a stranded motorist.

  In the stillness the flames went straight upward; the heat was wonderfully pleasant on icy hands and numb ankles and stiffened face. He looked across the road, stained by horses, broken by wheel and runner tracks, and saw how the roadside acquired definition and sharp angles and shadows in the firelight. He saw too how he would look to anyone coming along: like a calendar picture.

  But no one came along. Fifteen minutes stretched into a half hour, he had only two broken pieces of rail left, the fire sizzled, half floating in the puddle of its melting. Restlessly he rose with the blanket around him and walked back up the road a hundred steps. Eastward, above jagged trees, he saw the sky where it lightened to moonrise, but here there was still only the blue glimmer of starlight on the snow. Something long buried and forgotten tugged in him, and a shiver not entirely from cold prickled his whole body with gooseflesh. There had been times in his childhood when he had walked home alone and been temporarily lost in nights like this. In many years he could not remember being out alone under such a sky. He felt spooked, his feet were chilled lumps, his nose leaked. Down the hill, car and snow swam deceptively together; the red wink of the fire seemed inexpressibly far off.

  Abruptly he did not want to wait in that lonely snow-banked ditch any longer. The sample cases could look after themselves, any motorist who passed could take his own chances. He would walk ahead to the nearest help, and if he found himself getting too cold on the way, he could always build another fire. The thought of action cheered him; he admitted to himself that he was all but terrified at the silence and the iron cold.

  Closing the car doors, he dropped his key case, and panic stopped his pulse as he bent and frantically, with bare hand, brushed away the snow until he found it. The powdery snow ached and burned at his fingertips. He held them a last moment to the fire, and then, bundled like a squaw, with the blanket held across nose and mouth to ease the harshness of the cold in his lungs, he started up the road that looked as smooth as a tablecloth, but was deceptively rough and broken. He thought of what he had had every right to expect for this evening. By now, eight o’clock or so, he should have had a smoking supper, the luxury of a hot bath, the pleasure of a brandy in a comradely bar. By now he should be in pajamas making out sales reports by the bedlight, in a room where steam knocked comfortingly in the radiators and the help of a hundred hands was available to him at a word into the telephone. For all of this to be torn away suddenly, for him to be stumbling up a deserted road in danger of freezing to death, just because some simple mechanical part that had functioned for thirty thousand miles refused to function any longer, this was outrage, and he hated it. He thought of garage men and service station attendants he could blame. Ignoring the evidence of the flooded carburetor, he brooded about watered gas that could make ice in the gas line. A man was dependent on too many people; he was at everybody’s mercy.

  And then, on top of the second long rise, he met the moon.

  Instantly the character of the night changed. The uncertain starlight was replaced at a step by an even flood of blue-white radiance. He looked across a snow meadow and saw how a rail fence had every stake and rider doubled in solid shadow, and how the edge of woods beyond was blackest India ink. The road ahead was drawn with a ruler, one bank smoothed by the flood of light, the other deeply shadowed. As he looked into the eye of the moon he saw the air shiver and glint with falling particles of frost.

  In this White Christmas night, this Good King Wenceslas night, he went warily, not to be caught in sentimentality, and to an invisible audience he deprecated it profanely as a night in which no one would believe. Yet here it was, and he in it. With the coming of the moon the night even seemed to warm; he found that he could drop the blanket fr
om across his face and drink the still air.

  Along the roadside as he passed the meadow and entered woods again the moon showed him things. In moonlit openings he saw the snow stitched with tiny perfect tracks, mouse or weasel or the three-toed crowding tracks of partridge. These too, an indigenous part of the night, came back to him as things once known and long forgotten. In his boyhood he had trapped and hunted the animals that made such tracks as these; it was as if his mind were a snowfield where the marks of their secret little feet had been printed long ago. With a queer tightening of the throat, with an odd pride, he read the trail of a fox that had wallowed through the soft snow from the woods, angling into the packed road and along it for a little way and out again, still angling, across the plowed bank, and then left a purposeful trail of cleanly punched tracks, the hind feet in line with the front, across the clean snow and into the opposite woods, from shadow across moonlight and into shadow again.

  Turning with the road, he passed through the stretch of woods and came into the open to see the moon-white, shadow-black buildings of a farm, and the weak bloom of light in a window.

  His feet whined on the snow, dry as metal powder, as he turned in the loop of drive the county plow had cleared. But as he approached the house doubt touched him. In spite of the light, the place looked unused, somehow. No dog welcomed him. The sound of his feet in the snow was alien, the hammer of his knuckles on the door an intrusion. Looking upward for some trace of telephone wires, he saw none, and he could not tell whether the quivering of the air that he thought he saw above the chimney was heat or smoke or the phantasmal falling frost.

  “Hello?” he said, and knocked again. “Anybody home?” No sound answered him. He saw the moon glint on the great icicles along the eaves. His numb hand ached with the pain of knocking; he pounded with the soft edge of his fist.