boston review _ fifth annua

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Boston Review's Fifth Annual Short Story

Contest

Congratulations and the $1,000 first prize go to Kris Saknussemmfor this year's winning story. Congratulations also to our tworunners-up: "Strip" by Marianne Taylor and "The Pilot" by WadeEcher, stories forthcoming in Boston Review. The winners werechosen from among a group of finalists that included MelanieHammer, Mary Hazzard, Roderick Townley, and LawrenceCantera.

I am grateful for the hard work and discerning judgment of

life-saver Joanna Spaziani, who read every entry and helped tochoose our seven finalists. Finally, warmest thanks to the judges: C.Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly, Jill McCorkle, and EthanCanin, who made judging this year's contest a genuine pleasure.

The characters, situations, and even language of Kris Saknussemm's"Unpracticed Fingers Bungle Sadly Over Tiny Feathered Bodies"are so relentlessly original that one is hard-pressed, while reading it,to recall the existence of any other reality. With magnificentlysustained irony, the author pokes gentle fun at our human capacityfor weirdness, while celebrating weirdness's flip side: our infiniteindividuality.

Saknussemm's work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The New

England Review,Prairie Schooner,Nimrod, Southwest Review,and elsewhere. Raised on the West Coast, he graduated fromDartmouth College and holds an M.A. from the University ofWashington. Before abandoning a Ph.D. in anthropology inAustralia, he lived for a time with the John Frum cargo cultists onthe island of Tanna in Vanuatu. He now lives with his wife anddingo in rural Castlemaine, Australia.

--Jodi Daynard, Fiction Editor

Unpracticed Fingers BungleSadly Over Tiny Feathered

Bodies

by Kris Saknussemm

My mother came from an elm and mapled town of D.A.R. picnicsand brass spittoons, famous now as the home of a kind of industrialpudding, which for legal reasons I feel compelled not to name. Her

on Review | Fifth Annual Short Story Contest: Winner-- Kris Saknussemm http://bostonreview.net/BR22.6/Saknuss

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mother, Myra Haines, had been a beautiful opera singer in NewYork City until her career was cut short by a tumor in her throat.She married an older man named August Pomeroy who'd wanted tobe a Shakespearean actor but whose stern Victorian father hadforced him to be a banker instead. An older brother had wanted tobe a writer but had been given the ultimatum of becoming a doctoror becoming disinherited, to which he responded by shootinghimself in the temple with a derringer pistol--a gesture whichunfortunately failed to prove as final as he'd hoped. As my mother

put it, "His mortal coil remained unshuffled but his conversationalabilities were severely hampered."

He was to spend the rest of his life in gentlemanly albeit vegetable

seclusion in an apartment on the second floor of the family home,overlooking the garden and his rows of silver beehives, which noone had the heart to admit were really empty. At first, manyawkward attempts were made to cope with Uncle Ambrose's bees."My, the buzzing is so loud today! I hope they don't sting!" In timeit came to be understood that in some mysterious, private wayUncle Ambrose was indeed a keeper of a rare and extremelydelicate strain of bees, which were simply not ready to be released

into the larger world.

While the tragic tantrum with the gun may not have done anythingto further either his literary or his medical career, the consensus

was that it had done wonders for his temperament, which prior tothe powderburn had been bitter and unpredictable. One morning atbreakfast he wiped the molasses from his moustache, as if for thelast time, bowed his head to August and said with great gravity andconviction, "Thank you, brother, for doing more for me than Iconfess I would have ever done for you. And thank you all forbeing ever gracious and understanding on the somewhat ticklishsubject of my bees." With that he went upstairs and fell

asleep--only to wake up an hour later quite flabbergasted andannoyed that despite his farewell speech he was still very muchalive. He remained so for another thirteen years, during which timehe gave the more expected and tangible form of beekeeping a try,although it seems that what he really enjoyed was filling the bellowsfull of smoke and wandering through the graveyard across the roaddressed in his great cloud-white outfit and wide net hat.

With a younger brother dead of diphtheria and Ambroseindefinitely beekeeping, August and wife turned their backs on thepossibilities of stage life in the metropolis and set up shop amidstwhat Mrs. Camelia Dalrymple, their next-door neighbor, called "the

gloom and grandeur of August Pomeroy's ancestral home." Mrs.Dalrymple, who everyone apparently referred to as Mrs. Camelia

Dalrymple, had lost her husband to some sort of gall bladderinfection and was, according to my mother's estimate, four feet talland five feet wide. She was rarely seen in any dress which didn'tcall significant attention to her bosom, which was not only ample asmy mother said, "It was formidable." She could be counted on tosing "Twas the Last Rose of Summer" at the drop of a hat and hadspent the better part of her life rather shamelessly mooning overAugust Pomeroy to absolute no avail. In later years my mother wasof the mind that it wasn't so much the man as the mansion that Mrs.


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Dalrymple craved.

The house was indeed something to blink your eyes at and makesure of--a gargantuan clapboard witch's hat bewildered by widow'swalks, angel's teeth, turrets and gingerbread, with a deep balconyrunning around the entire house, with creaky mysterious screendoors that seemed to whisper and wheeze even on humid summerevenings and an ornate white porch swing devised especially by anold Italian who had made his living carving carousel animals before

he went blind.

Inside, there were chimneys and chamber pots, flintlocks andpowderhorns, a huge Atlas moth mounted on cork in a glass caseand a parchment copy of "The Song of Hiawatha" framed and

signed by Longfellow himself. From the steep roof in winter, iciclesas big as my mother would hang, and all along the long drive theautumn leaves would fall like puddles of paint leading to the greatmad shipwreck of a sagging barn that had such a harshly pitchedroof it once scared away a young rafter monkey of a lightning rodsalesman on the 4th of July, 1899. (Although he grew up to tell thetale from the floor of the State Senate, of his harrowing ordeal on

the roof of the Pomeroy's barn, emphasizing the moral and spiritualdangers of trying to make a sale on a national holiday.)

The barn was in fact the bunkhouse, workshop, library and saloonfor Knut, the family handyman, who claimed to have lost the indexfinger on his right hand feeding rabbit meat to the Great HornedOwl named Barnabas which his father once kept as a pet.Somewhere in the chewing tobacco and boiled shirt past, Knut'sfather had done August Pomeroy some good turn, which AugustPomeroy never forgot. There was no other explanation, becauseaccording to my mother, Knut was the unhandiest of handymen anda completely incorrigible drunk. His principal virtue was that,

fortified with the liquor he was not under any circumstances toconsume, he was always quite happy to hitch up the horse andbuggy in even the worst snowbelt blizzard (in which case theywould take the sleigh because August Pomeroy refused to haveanything whatsoever to do with automobiles), and off they wouldgo. Many of these missions were bank foreclosures of farms. Onsuch trips, August Pomeroy would sit stone-still and emotionless.He believed in handling such sad assignments personally, and whilehe never once showed the slightest ripple of sadness, it was a rareforeclosure that didn't happen over a bottle of cider or thedistribution of barley sugar to a floorful of ragamuffin children,while unnoticed by the desolate family, Knut would stagger back

and forth from the buggy with smoked meats, preserves, and ifChristmas was anywhere near, a fat tom turkey for the axe.

Not surprisingly, the buggy could get pretty full in bad weather and

such trips were no doubt not for the faint-hearted. August Pomeroywould sit undaunted, regardless of the weather or the terrain,poking and puffing his cherrywood pipe, which my mother said he'dmysteriously learned to smoke upside-down in the rain, Knut besidehim, reeking of the alcohol he'd pledged to give up, flailing andstraying like a scarecrow on a wire, and when-ever Mrs. Malaprop,the big bay mare started swerving off track, August Pomeroy wouldbreak the composed determination of his pipe-smoking silence and


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in as dignified a manner as possible he would shout through thewind and the haze of moonshine that was driving his handyman intoan early grave and them both into a tree or an on-coming train,"Hold her Knut! She's headed for the rhubarb!"

August and Myra Pomeroy had two other children: Royce, mymother's brother who was in the Navy during the War and laterwent to medical school and became an eye specialist with a blackGreat Dane named Cassius, a former majorette wife named Doreen

and an autistic son, named Ted--and my mother's sister Orpah. Ionly met Uncle Royce on two occasions, both when I was prettyyoung, but I remember him vividly. He was a man of substantial,self-satisfied girth, but like those men whose hairlines are forever

receding without ever entirely disappearing and so will never beexactly what you would call bald, you could tell that he could getincreasingly substantial and never be exactly what you would callfat.

He had a little Hitlerian moustache he would dab his napkin at aftereating corn on the cob, and when he became prosperous as adoctor, he invested significant time and money locating the first car

he'd ever owned, which was still in existence, but rusting in somewoman's barn near Lake Champlain. The first time I met him he'djust bought it back and refurbished it. The second time I rememberwas when they came to visit us in California, and we were on one

of the Red and White Cruisers that leave from Fisherman's Wharf.We were chopping through the water and grit from the mensandblasting the Golden Gate Bridge was raining down on the deck.We had to go inside. Uncle Royce was having a terrible time eatinga hot dog. He was talking to my father about money. I rememberUncle Royce swallowing his hot dog and saying, "You know, youcan't have anything you want. Only a very few people get whatthey want--and even they don't get everything."

My mother wasn't born until her mother was forty. August Pomeroywas sixty. He wore white linen ice-cream suits in summer and whitewoollen suits in winter and strolled around town with his sulphur-crested cockatoo named Ophelia on his shoulder, and a pet squirrelnamed Familiar that he'd saved from a rat trap and nursed back tohealth with peanut butter and warm milk, in his pocket. One nightshortly before his death, Myra found him dragging the familygrandfather clock with the tiny painted signs of the Zodiac out intothe back-yard to bury in a grave he'd apparently dug himselfespecially for that purpose. By way of an explanation he remarkedcryptically that "a grandfather clock is precisely half-way between

a coffin and a man."

And while I may have mentioned some of the features of the house,such as the bamboo elephant that contained English walnuts and

lemon drops, or the dumb waiter in one of the marble fireplaces, orthe puzzling bell system that was designed to alert servants in thekitchen that something was wanted in the Poplar Room or the OakRoom (my mother's was the Cypress Room), which Uncle Ambroserewired so that all the wrong bells would ring, and was unnecessaryanyway because the family didn't have any servants except for Mrs.Todd, a crookback woman with chronic dermatitis who came in todo the laundry and occasionally cook a roast, bake a pie and walk a


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damp rag like a cat down the keys of the mahogany piano, whichKnut once remarked in a moment of surprising lucidity, was so bigyou didn't see it--I haven't said anything about the sad case of theFinger Lakes Taxidermological Museum, which due to extremefinancial difficulty was forced to close its doors and sell itsremarkable collection of local and exotic specimens for a song. Thepurchaser in this instance was none other than August Pomeroy. Asa result of that singular acquisition, the gloom, if not the grandeurof the Pomeroy home was greatly enhanced. It became literally

stuffed with stuffed animals--from pileated woodpeckers with theirtalons wrapped around ceramic branches to wildcat heads mountedon ash wood shields. There were gulls, larks, and loons--hoodedmergansers, sapsuckers, orioles, waxwings, warblers, wrens--and amotheaten beakless titmouse.

In the critter category, there were things like raccoons and weasels,muskrats and mink--even a Goliath bullfrog from Africa. Therewere two whole coyotes, two moose heads, five elk heads, anantelope head, (in addition to an ibex and an impala), a ram's headwith bronzed horns, a wildebeest head that Mrs. Todd complainedto, a full sized puma and a fearsome wolverine rug that still had fine

traces of powdered magnesia in the fur. Then there were rarerspecimens: guanaco and vicuna skins, a marsupial possum from

Australia and an adolescent-sized Louisiana alligator that had beenshot in the head after ravaging a cane farmer's prize bird dog.

This ragtag-and-bobtail menagerie came complete with a range oftaxidermy tools and a rather remarkable library covering everyfacet of the art and science, beginning with the Carthaginianaccount of a preserved gorilla discovered in the year 500 BC, and adiscussion of the rhinoceros in the Royal Museum of Vertebrates inFlorence said to have been mounted originally in the 16th century.

Where the house had once seemed elegantly crowded withlorgnettes and dueling pistols, it now flowed to bursting and out intothe barn with skinning knives, scalpels, butcher's knives, tanner'sknives, nose pliers, forceps, handsaws, hacksaws, hatchets,hammers, bit braces, drawshaves, screwdrivers, corundum wheels,chisels, rasps, awls, pinking irons, needles, oilstones, monkeywrenches, fur combs, foot rules, excelsior, cotton batting, plaster ofparis, corn meal, gasoline, modeling clay, fishing line, earthen jarsto hold skin pickle, annealed galvanized iron wire, dry arsenic andalum, white bar soap, camphor gum, subcarbonate of potash, woodalcohol, formaldehyde, barrels and barrels of salt, not to mentionlarge quantities of beeswax, sulphuric and carbolic acids, any

number of oils, varnishes, glues, pastes, paints, and arguably one ofthe largest private collections of glass eyes in the world.

The accompanying library became especially popular with Uncle

Ambrose, who over time fell into the habit of bribing Knut withnickels and dimes for his secret liquor fund, in return for havingKnut read him at random in his uncertain ponderousness whichcould make the even baldest instruction seem crazed withimportance.Many a fine head mounted green, without thinning orpickling, has shrunk and continued to shrink for months, until all

stitches gave way and it cracked and shriveled to an inglorious

end.


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Each evening in summer, Uncle Ambrose would waltz a ladderbackrocker out of the parlor and across the lawn, and amidst thepeacock feathers, fox tails, buckhorn handles and riding whips inthe bunkhouse wing of the barn where Knut felt most comfortable,he would sit rapt in devoted concentration by the light of ahurricane lamp, nodding respectfully whenever the nine-fingeredhandyman would take a swig of the White Lion grain alcohol hekept in a collapsed tripes-and-keister under his horseblanket andslatboard bed, that Myra Pomeroy said reminded him of the drunk

tank jail cell he'd once called home for a whole winter during WorldWar I.

It was difficult to say what Uncle Ambrose thought of as Knut, in

his best church-serious voice, struggled to read The brain may beremoved with a hooked wire, the skull well rinsed and given a

good coat of arsenical paste. The eye sockets are to be filled with

balls of wt cotton to render the lids and surrounding skin soft. Fora long time it was assumed that he simply enjoyed the sound ofKnut's voice and the secretive, embalmer's laboratory atmosphere.But every so often he demonstrated that he was actually listeningand remembering, and at choice moments he was known to pop out

with some kernel of wisdom such as Unpracticed fingers bunglesadly over tiny feathered bodies, which became the official motto

of the Pomeroy home.

I'm sorry I never got to meet Uncle Ambrose, who finally did diepeacefully in his sleep. Knut too, came to a bad end long before Iwas born. One morning they found him in a snowbank as stiff as astuffed alligator. August Pomeroy bought him the biggest headstonein town, some said because he was senile by that time, othersbecause he enjoyed the irony of a drunken nine-fingered handymanhaving the biggest tombstone short of the crypt belonging to thefamily that invented the industrial pudding. August Pomeroy

himself died, his brain riddled with cancer, just before my motherand father were married (having inexplicably tried to bury thegrandfather clock on two more occasions).

I remember going to visit the great house when I was four years old.I had a terrible nightmare about all the animals coming to life--thestuffed deer heads and moose and buffalo, owls and eagles--all theanimals were whispering. In every room I went in all the animalheads were alive. The next day I found several play scripts rolledup inside one of the stuffed owls in my grandfather's study. Iimagine he read them late at night when he locked the door andretreated into his private theater which perhaps kept him sane

enough to stride out of the front gate each morning, scratch a matchon the slate steps of the Episcopal church, light his pipe, and march

toward the huge white colonnades of the bank. During his lunchhour he taught Ophelia to quote Shakespeare. O, what a noble mindis here o'erthrown!

After August Pomeroy died it became clear that he should've beenan actor because he'd bungled the accounts at the bank and bungledtheir personal finances, which left Myra with virtually no moneyexcept some stock in Eastman Kodak. She couldn't afford to heatthe house so she closed up most of it and lived down in the kitchen.For many months after August's death, mysterious bags of grain and


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Copyright Boston Review, 19932005. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce without permission.

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fruit showed up on the porch--anonymous "thank you's" from folkshe'd helped battle foreclosure and despair. Myra clenched her teethand puffed up proud and ornery. She lived until she was 80, whenshe put herself in the hospital with a heart attack after mowing theirenormous lawn and died of "complications."

My mother, Eileen, grew up wanting to be a musician just like hermother. From the age of three she played the violin four hours aday. She was giving concerts in Rochester and Buffalo by the age

of 10. Orpah, who could be the subject of a lifetime psychologicalinvestigation, had quietly slipped into the background and washappy to see her sister on stage. Even Royce, four years older,jovial big-headed bully that he was, seemed to be happy to see little

Eileen shine. Then it happened.

My father's theory, expressed confidentially many years later aftersix Manhattans was that Royce was a prig, and that his priggishnesshad been offended to the point of driving him momentarily madwhen my mother accidentally witnessed him masturbating. I'msorry to say that I have no further information to substantiate thistheory. In any case, the result was a frantic chase around the

house--Royce whipping at Eileen with her violin bow. Sheeventually took refuge in one of the cupolas and in sliding down theroof to dangle in another window, it happened.

I can see Royce, 16 years old, naked to the waist, old shorts from

there down. His eyes are wild with rage, his hair glued to his

forehead with sweat. He's standing in the window. And just as

Eileen's young hands slip all the way inside to clutch the sill and

drag herself through . . . CRASH

It was Uncle Ambrose who collared Royce and sent Knut to get thedoctor for Eileen. Both her wrists were badly broken, the fingers on

her left hand smashed and cut from a second eye-blink slam of thewindow. Beside the blood, the main problem, at least in themoment, was the screaming. As Mrs. Camelia Dalrymple said later,"I thought the end of the world had come."

Perhaps it had. When Eileen--my mother--got the casts cut off herhands the first thing she did was take one of the hacksaws from the

taxidermy tools and saw her violin in half. Then, as far as I know,she put both halves back in the black leather case and never openedit again.

Originally published in the December 1997/ January 1998 issue of Boston Review


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