Gina Berriault (1926 – 1999)
American novelist and short story writer, best known for her novels and The Stone Boy.
The Stone Boy was written in 1957, was adapted as a television play in 1960, then published in the collection The Mistress and Other Short Stories in 1965, and then in her 1996 collection Women in their Beds. Berriault also adapted the story into a screenplay for a film of the same name in 1984.
Available to read online here.
This is the fourth of eight stories in the volume Points of View to be given the style classification by Moffett and McElheny of Biography, or Anonymous Narration – Single Character Point of View. Their introduction continues: “The reader sees the world as that chosen person sees it, but he also understands it as the author does, for the hidden narrator is paraphrasing what the character thinks as well as commenting directly.”
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t read the story yet and want to before you read the summary of it below, stop now!
The Stone Boy
Nine year old Arnold Curwing wakes up in the farmhouse bedroom he shares with his fifteen year old brother Eugie. They’re going out to pick peas before breakfast. With any luck, they’ll shoot some ducks too, even though it’s out of season. When they go out, he takes his .22 Winchester rifle with him. They make their way through the wheat field down to the lake where the ducks live. There’s a wire fence that they have to crawl through, so Eugie pulls the centre wire down so they can go into the pasture. Arnold is halfway through the fence when his rifle catches on the wire. He tugs at it to free it, and a shot rings out. He expects Eugie to deride his stupidity, but Eugie is silent, having fallen forward onto the earth. Blood emerges from the neck of his motionless, dead brother.
All Arnold can do is continue with the plan to collect peas, and he half fills the tin washtub they brought with them. When he arrives home, he knows he’ll have to explain why Eugie isn’t with him. ““Eugie’s dead,” he told them.” His parents and sister Nora go out to investigate whilst Arnold sneaks off to hide in the hayloft. He can hear the shrieks of grief, the car driving off in a hurry, and his father’s return along with his Uncle Andy and Aunt Alice.
Arnold is driven to the sheriff’s office in Corinth, where they ask him about what happened. He answers their questions calmly, emotionlessly and straightforwardly. Whilst they understand that it was an accident, they can’t understand why he didn’t immediately run back to his parents to tell them. “”I come down to pick peas,” he said. “Didn’t you think, asked the sheriff, stepping carefully from word to word, “that is was more important for you to go tell your parents what had happened?” “The sun was gonna come up,” Arnold said. “What’s that got to do with it?” “It’s better to pick peas while they’re cool.””
Arnold and his family are allowed to return home. After work, the neighbours arrive, recounting memories of Eugie, quizzically wondering about Arnold and his reaction to what happened. But Arnold stays silent, and assumes that he must be a bad person because, clearly, everyone else thinks he is a bad person. Later on he tries to open up to his mother but she, in her grief, rejects him. The next morning, however, she asks him if he had tried to speak to her the previous night. ““What’d you want?” she asked humbly. “I didn’t want nothing,” he said flatly. Then he went out the door and down the back steps, his legs trembling from the fright his answer gave him.””
Beautifully under-written by Berriault, she quietly tells us about this grim event in a colourless, hard-working environment. The power of this work is in the contrast between the devastating events of the story and the emotionless reaction of Arnold and, indeed, the matter-of-fact manner of the narration. Understanding Arnold’s character is key to appreciating the story as a whole. When we first meet him, he is taking one of the few opportunities he has of asserting himself over the superiority of his big brother; by waking up first, and shaking Eugie from his sleep, he is in command of the early morning situation.
As soon as Eugie takes control of his own day, Arnold must return to taking a back seat. “Eugie passed his left hand through his hair before he set his cap down with his right. The very way he slipped his cap on was an announcement of his status […] Arnold never tired of watching Eugie offer silent praise unto himself. He wondered, as he sat enthralled, if when he got to be Eugie’s age he would still be undersized and his hair still straight.” The only superiority Arnold can muster over Eugie is possession of his rifle. It was old, and no one else used it or wanted it anymore. Yet, at the age of nine, Arnold is fully competent to load the gun with cartridges, and he has the power to kill ducks as he wishes.
With his stultifyingly logical mind and willingness to answer the exact question he is given, rather than see through a question to understand the motivation behind it, today we would probably venture Arnold to be neurodivergent. A good example of this is when the sheriff asks Arnold if he and Eugie were “good friends”. He’s trying to identify if there could be any rift or disagreements between the two brothers. But Arnold can’t answer that because of course they weren’t friends, they were brothers. They’re different things. He can’t intuit what the sheriff is getting at.
At the time of writing, there was no such concept as “neurodivergence”. At the end of his short interview with Arnold, the sheriff tells his father and Andy “he’s either a moron or he’s so reasonable that he’s way ahead of us […] the most reasonable guys are mean ones. They don’t feel nothing.” Clearly, it’s the sheriff’s view that Arnold will return to his attention in a few years’ time; he expects him to continue a life of crime. That’s not Arnold’s view of his own life at all; but he is shocked at himself when he can’t bring himself to open up about his brother’s death.
A fascinating and disturbing read, not only illustrating how a simple incident can accidentally bring catastrophic results, but also showing how shock can compound an inability to communicate.
The next story in the anthology is the fifth to be classified by Moffett and McElheny as Biography, or Anonymous Narration – Single Character Point of View, Enemies by Anton Chekhov.