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Biographical note: Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family’s dairy farm in the mountains of southern West Virginia. He has published two collections of short fiction and a novel. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, the O. Henry Award series, the New Stories from the South series, the Pushcart Prize series, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781907773006
ISBN: 9781907773006
Author: Pinckney Benedict
Title: Miracle Boy and Other Stories
Series: Salt Modern Fiction
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: FA
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 01-Jan-11
Extent: 272pp
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight: 408 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 8.99
Price: USD 14.95
Rights: World
Not for sale: US
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description/annotation: A new volume of fourteen short stories from the highly-regarded author of Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard. All of Benedict’s considerable talents are on show: the perfectly-captured Southern rural backdrops along with the often bizarre intensities of small town life. This new collection bristles with portraits of the grotesque, the ignorant, the disconsolate, the cruel and the lonely, and all of them heading to those singular incidents in which we find recognition, epiphany and, sometimes, compassion.
Main description: The story collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories contains fourteen works of short fiction written over the last fifteen years – and published in some of America’s top literary magazines and anthologies – by one of West Virginia’s most established and well-recognized writers of short fiction. The stories, all set in the author’s native Appalachia, concern themselves with the lives of boys and men, all of them in some manner miraculous: from a boy who loses his feet and gains them again to a hunting dog that learns to talk. Though many of the stories contain supernatural or surreal elements, all are grounded in the realities of life in the Appalachian highlands. These are rough-and-tumble stories about a hardscrabble mountain landscape, and they modulate between love and violence, between beauty and abject terror.
Table of contents:
Miracle Boy
Buckeyes
The Butcher Cock
Pony Car
Joe Messinger is Dreaming
Mudman
Bridge of Sighs
The Beginnings of Sorrow
The Angel's Trumpet
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
Pig Helmet & the Wall of Life
The Secret Nature of the Mechanical Rabbit
Mercy
Zog-19: A Scientific Romance View excerpt as PDF:
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Excerpt from book:
Miracle Boy
Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie wanted to see the scars. Show us the scars, Miracle Boy, they said.
They cornered Miracle Boy after school one day, waited for him behind the shop-class shed, out beyond the baseball diamond, where the junior high's property bordered McClung's place. Miracle Boy always went home that way, over the fence stile and across the fields with his weird shuffling gait and the black-locust walking stick that his old man had made for him. His old man's place bordered McClung's on the other side.
Show us the scars. Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie knew all about the accident and Miracle Boy's reattached feet. The newspaper headline had named him Miracle Boy. MIRACLE BOY'S FEET REATTACHED IN EIGHT-HOUR SURGERY. Everybody in school knew, everybody in town. Theirs was not a big town. It had happened a number of years before, but an accident of that sort has a long memory.
Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie wanted to see where the feet had been sewn back on. They were interested to see what a miracle looked like. They knew about miracles from the Bible?—?the burning bush, Lazarus who walked again after death?—?and it got their curiosity up.
Miracle Boy didn't want to show them. He shook his head when they said to him, Show us the scars. He was a portly boy, soft and jiggly at his hips and belly from not being able to run around and play sports like other boys, like Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie. He was pigeon-toed and wearing heavy dark brogans that looked like they might have some therapeutic value. His black corduroy pants were too long for him and pooled around his ankles. He carried his locust walking stick in one hand.
Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie asked him one last time?—?they were being patient with him because he was a cripple?—?and then they knocked him down. Eskimo Pie sat on his head while the other two took off his pants and shoes and socks. They flung his socks and pants over the sagging woven-wire fence. One of the heavy white socks caught on the rusted single strand of bob-wire along the top of the fence. They tied the legs of his pants in a big knot before tossing them. They tied the laces of the heavy brogans together and pitched them high in the air, so that they caught and dangled from the electric line overhead. Miracle Boy said nothing while they were doing it. Eskimo Pie took his walking stick from him and threw it into the bushes.
They pinned Miracle Boy to the ground and examined his knotted ankles, the smooth lines of the scars, their pearly whiteness, the pink and red and purple of the swollen, painful-looking skin around them.
Don't look like any miracle to me, said Eskimo Pie. Miracle Boy wasn't fighting them. He was just lying there, looking in the other direction. McClung's Hereford steers had drifted over to the fence, excited by the goings-on, thinking maybe somebody was going to feed them. They were a good-looking bunch of whiteface cattle, smooth-hided and stocky, and they'd be going to market soon.
It just looks like a mess of old scars to me, Eskimo Pie said.
Eskimo Pie and Geronimo were brothers. Their old man had lost three quarters of his left hand to the downstroke of a hydraulic fence-post driver a while before, but that hadn't left anything much to reattach.
It's miracles around us every day, said Miracle Boy.
Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie stopped turning his feet this way and that like the intriguing feet of a dead man. Miracle Boy's voice was soft and piping, and they stopped to listen.
What's that? Geronimo wanted to know. He nudged Miracle Boy with his toe.
Jesus, he made the lame man to walk, Miracle Boy said. And Jesus, he made me to walk, too.
But you wasn't lame before, Geronimo said. Did Jesus take your feet off just so he could put them back on you?
Miracle Boy didn't say anything more. Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie noticed then that he was crying. His face was wet, shining with tears and mucus. They saw him bawling, without his shoes and socks and trousers, sprawled in his underpants on the ground, his walking stick caught in a pricker bush. They decided that this did not look good.
They were tempted to leave him, but instead they helped him up and retrieved his socks and unknotted his pants and assisted him into them. He was still crying as they did it. Eskimo Pie presented the walking stick to him with a flourish. They debated briefly whether to go after his shoes, dangling from the power line overhead. In the end, though, they decided that, having set him on his feet again, they had done enough.
•
Miracle Boy's old man was the one who cut Miracle Boy's feet off. He was chopping corn into silage. One of the front wheels of the Case 1370 Agri-King that he was driving broke through the crust of the cornfield into a snake's nest. Copperheads boiled up out of the ground. The tractor nose-dived, heeled hard over to one side, and Miracle Boy slid off the fender where he'd been riding.
Miracle Boy's old man couldn't believe what he had done. He shut off the tractor's power-takeoff and scrambled down from the high seat. He was sobbing. He pulled his boy out of the jaws of the silage chopper and saw that the chopper had taken his feet.
It's hard not to admire what he did next.
Thinking fast, he put his boy down, gently put his maimed boy down on the ground. He had to sweep panicked copperheads out of the way to do it. He made a tourniquet for one leg with his belt, made another with his blue bandanna that he kept in his back pocket. Then he went up the side of the silage wagon like a monkey. He began digging in the silage. He dug down into the wet heavy stuff with his bare hands.
From where he was lying on the ground, the boy could see the silage flying. He could tell that his feet were gone. He knew what his old man was looking for up there. He knew exactly.
•
Miracle Boy's old man called Lizard's mother on the telephone. He told Lizard's mother what Lizard and Geronimo and Eskimo Pie had done to Miracle Boy. He told her that they had taken Miracle Boy's shoes from him. That was the worst part of what they had done, he said, to steal a defenseless boy's shoes.The next day, Miracle Boy's old man came by Lizard's house. He brought Miracle Boy with him. Lizard thought that probably Miracle Boy's old man was going to whip the tar out of him for his part in what had been done to Miracle Boy. He figured Miracle Boy was there to watch the beating. Lizard's own old man was gone, and his mother never laid a hand on him, so he figured that, on this occasion, Miracle Boy's old man would likely fill in.
Instead, Lizard's mother made them sit in the front room together, Lizard and Miracle Boy. She brought them cold Coca-Colas and grilled cheese sandwiches. She let them watch TV. An old movie was on; it was called Dinosaurus!. Monsters tore at one another on the TV screen and chased tiny humans. Even though it was the kind of thing he would normally have liked, Lizard couldn't keep his mind on the movie. Miracle Boy sat in the crackling brown reclining chair that had belonged to Lizard's old man. The two of them ate from TV trays, and whenever Miracle Boy finished his glass of Coca-Cola, Lizard's mother brought him more. She brought Lizard more, too, and she looked at him with searching eyes, but Lizard could not read the message in her gaze.
By the third glassful of Coca-Cola, Lizard started to feel a little sick, but Miracle Boy went right on, drinking and watching Dinosaurus! with an enraptured expression on his face, occasionally belching quietly. Sometimes his lips moved, and Lizard thought he might be getting ready to say something, but he and Lizard never swapped a single word the whole time.
Miracle Boy's old man sat on the front porch of Lizard's house and looked out over the shrouded western slope of the Blue Ridge and swigged at the iced tea that Lizard's mother brought him, never moving from his seat until Dinosaurus! was over and it was time to take Miracle Boy away.
Previous review quote: An often heart-stopping literary performance. The New York Times Previous review quote: Benedict evokes the world of hard-bitten Southern men who live in shabby weatherbeaten houses or rickety trailers, who work in tire factories or slaughterhouses, who are slow to speak but quick to explode in anger, and whose women are tangential figures. Publishers Weekly Previous review quote: What Beattie did for urbanites, Cheever and Updike for suburbanites, a younger generation Omstead, Abbott, Cullen, and now Benedict is doing for the rural population. Only 22 and recipient of the 1986 Nelson Algren Award, Benedict has published stories in the Chicago Tribune and Ontario Review. His world is regional, tough, raw, male; these nine stories deal with the mountain men, sheep farmers, and hog raisers of rural West Virginia. Library Journal Previous review quote: Benedict's first collection of stories since his auspicious if uneven debut (Town Smokes, 1987) is a far more accomplished work, establishing him among the best young southern writers – full of passion and mature enough to keep it under control. Benedict searches out the moral dimension in the hardscrabble lives of rednecks and country people, and transcends the folksy bromides they espouse. He discerns the confusion and ambiguities in their seemingly uncomplicated lives. Kirkus Reviews Previous review quote: In this taut, muscular thriller set in contemporary rural West Virginia, short-story writer Benedict (The Wrecking Yard) hurtles the reader toward a chillingly apocalyptic climax replete with high-tech weaponry and old-fashioned treachery. Peopled with an assortment of New South grotesques, the story centers on Goody, a young bare-fisted fighter new to the neighborhood, and Tannhauser, a deranged, 12-fingered backwoods drug lord with a penchant for sadism. Publishers Weekly Previous review quote: In this first novel, Benedict continues his exploration of rural West Virginia life begun in his two short story collections, The Wrecking Yard and Town Smokes. As in the short stories, the writing here is strong and vivid. The wide cast of characters includes Goody (a boxer), Dwight (a tourist guide), drug enforcement agents, marijuana growers, gunrunners, illegal immigrants, and a variety of lost and corrupt souls. They live and die in an atmosphere of bleakness and despair, with violence and brutality as constant companions. Library Journal Previous review quote: Benedict, who lives in West Virginia, is the author of two highly regarded short story collections, Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard. In this, his first novel, individual chapters have the compression of short stories, but he fails to maintain a novel-length narrative flow, and none of his characters sustain interest for the book's 300-plus pages. Still, his language is vivid and assured, his dialogue is skillfully written and convincing, and he creates an atmosphere of unsettling strangeness. Booklist Previous review quote: The first novel by storywriter Benedict (Town Smokes, 1987; The Wrecking Yard, 1992) barely resembles his measured and lyrical short fiction. Benedict owes more here to action movies than to any literary source: the levels of violence and the plot improbabilities have the same nihilistic drive of a Peckinpah film. In Benedict's West Virginia, the smell of death pervades the air, and wild dogs and boars rule the uninhabited forest. Government land, long abandoned, now serves the local drug lords, who import South American laborers to harvest their best cash crop: marijuana. Into this corrupt mountain community stumbles Goody, a good but troubled bare-fisted boxer who once killed a man in a dirty match. Kirkus Reviews |
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