SSM 2010 - Discussion of Alyson Hagy's "Border"

The second collection we'll be looking into so closely this month was recently published by Graywolf Press.  It is Alyson Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming. 

Like Pinckney, Alyson is a master of the short story, while also a novelist, and an another author whose work I've enjoyed for over two decades now.  A slight disclaimer from my end, Alyson taught the only creative writing class I've ever taken (sorry again, Alyson), and is also a great portion of the reason that there is an EWN.  That said, I've read her three earlier short story collections:  Madonna on Her Back (Stuart Wright, 1986), Hardware River and Other Stories (Poseidon Press, 1991) and Graveyard of the Atlantic (Graywolf Press, 2000) and have been waiting for this one for a decade (though with a novel or two during that time to keep me reading her work).

Reminder, there are some spoilers as the story is discussed in detail.

“Border” by Alyson Hagy

 

Charles May

It seems to me that the key to the effectiveness of this story is Hagy’s ability to withhold crucial information until the very end without causing the story to collapse into an O’Henry surprise trick ending.  I think she does this by exploiting the reader’s tendency to read short stories too fast and thus miss the little clues that something bad has happened that the boy, whose thoughts we are privy too, is just not thinking about.  The only indication we have of this secret from the past is when, early in the story, the boy wishes he could stop at a café, but knows he cannot “because of the deputies and what had happened with his father.”

Like most short stories that depend on an ending that pulls us up short, this one has to be read a second time, once we have the ending imprinted on out minds.  We get subtle clues—e.g. the reference to the bottled water his father made fun of--that the boy’s relationship with his father has not been a good one and that the mother has “never been part of anything.”  But it is not until we know how extreme that schism between the boy and his father has been that we understand his relationship with the Border collie.

He treats the dog as if he were a good father and the dog is his child, echoing the baby sounds the dog makes, being nipped by the dog’s sharp baby teeth, telling her she is smart to make him proud on her first day, apologizing for not feeding her right away and leaving her for a short time in a trash barrel.

His fatherly need to protect the dog is embodied in the scene with the “good cop/bad cop” cowboys who pick him up. The one named Ray is just petty and “mean,” chaffing over his failure to prove himself a man by being thrown off the back of “the crippledest mare on the Western slope.”  The boy knows from his father that because Ray is a loser, he has to make someone else the loser.  After Ray throws the dog out the truck window, the boy is again proud of her for being so tough and for how readily she learned things, especially the lesson that he has obviously learned and doesn’t want to teach her right away—“the black lesson of fear.”

But the final lesson, of course, is the lesson that the teacher teaches him--the lesson of betrayal.  If Ray is a loser who wants someone else to lose, then the teacher, because she cannot get answers to her questions, leaves the boy with a question he cannot answer—why would she not want the dog?  Although we cannot really blame the woman for calling the deputies, for she has obviously read about the boy in the papers and knows he has killed his father, at the same time, we have grown to like the boy so much that we cannot feel kindly toward her.  When she refuses to take care of the dog, the boy cannot understand, for he knows the dog would be good for her.  “How could anybody not want the thing that would keep them from being sent backward one last time?  With this line, we understand the basic human need felt by all the characters in the story—the need to nurture and be nurtured, to love and be loved, without which one becomes hard and “mean.” As the teacher says, “It’s the kind of person I am. What I’ve turned into.”

 

Jane Ciabattari

 

What struck me about "Border" in addition to the indirect narrative structure, which Charles explains so well, and the surprise payoff at the end, was the language and the subtle ways in which Hagy reveals character.

Hagy sets the story up with what appears to be "what it's about" first sentence: "It was not as hard to steal the collie pup as he thought it would be."

She follows with a deft sense of place, season, weather.  The hungry boy can smell "tacos and fry bread" for sale on the fairgrounds; the heat "slowed things down, even for the dogs."

Her language is vivid and visual when it comes to stealing the pup: "...he used two hands for support so as not to shock the pup, wanting it to think well of him from the get-go." Later, as he examines the pup. "...he saw its tongue bend in an arch as it yawned." Its tiny teeth were "see-through and small like fish teeth."

This is a violent story, grounded in the West (on the border of Wyoming and Colorado). Hagy's subtle touches signal that the boy, at 14, has tenderness as well as the hardened self-protective skills of a kid who has been knocked around plenty.

She makes this hard-knock upbringing clear with at various moments. He knows that the girl with "smooth brown hair held off her neck in braids" like 4-H girls, would take the blame for the theft of the pup; "That was how things worked." 

When the pup pees on the lap of the rodeo cowboy's loser buddy Ray, and Ray goes for his belt,  the boy reacts like a cornered rattler: "...that meant two things to him in the backseat--it meant belt whipping or worse--and he'd given up taking the hurting of both, so he reared between the seats and grabbed for little Bell." 

When he's awakened by sheriff's deputies in the schoolteacher's house, "the inside of him took off running at full speed..." but he stayed stiff and quiet, knowing he's trapped. As the deputy pats him down, Hagy elaborates upon the boy's survival strategy:"...his mind went to a high, cool place where it could stand hours of dark and hours of light and still hear the occasional hopeful words if they were spoken."  And when the woman with "padlocked eyes" says out loud what he's done, and then notes, "It might have been right to do that. I don't know.Things get out of order in a family," the boy's response is consistent: "He climbed upward to his safe inside place, hand over hand."

 

Anna Clark

 

What I love is how this story offers a dark, unsettling variation on the "boy and his dog" genre of literature. (See: Old Yeller, Shiloh, Where the Red Fern Grows, Lassie Come Home, Henry and Ribsy, and, ahem, Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog.)" And I have to say, I was both surprised and impressed that the late revelation of key information worked for me in this story. Especially for a story that sticks close to the point-of-view of our protagonist, such fundamental information being withheld should've rung false. But it didn't. I don't think Hagy could've made this work if the story were much longer; the spare scope of the story in both length and time (it takes place over one day) keeps the revelation from slipping into trickery. As well, it works because the revelation comes out in dialogue with the tea-giving woman at the end; he answers because he was asked. This suddenly draws attention to how little has been asked of this protagonist throughout the story--as he is alone traveling, walking, hitching rides, why hasn't anyone asked questions of him before the woman? The onus is on us readers too: why have we assumed so much about him, despite a lack of textual confirmation?

Charles points out that this woman at the end, the schoolteacher, offers the final lesson of betrayal--but it is telling that this betrayal is felt not in her call of the deputies after she fed him and offered him a warm place to stay. It's not even felt in our concern over Bell, the puppy, who she rather kindly urges the deputies to let ride with him because "he won't see her again." Rather, the betrayal is felt in the teacher's refusal of an opportunity to lovingly connect with a living creature. It is the lack of this connection that pushes someone "backward." For our protagonist, who has clearly felt a void of loving connection in his life, it is bewildering that someone would have an opportunity to have it, and choose otherwise. Indeed, he feels that people have a responsibility to these connections. As he tells the teacher, "I guess I don't think it's right not to think of her, a little dog, when you make a decision." And this, this statement on what is morally right and wrong, comes from a character who is being arrested after being a fugitive from a bloody act in another state. Its' importance can't be under-estimated.

The title of the story seems to be a pun: it evokes both how our protagonist traverses a state border in his journey and Bell's breed (Border Collie, which is of course a traditional companion dog). While it can also evoke the borders among different emotional states, the "crossing over" from one place to another--as seen, perhaps, in the character's changing role from being loner to caretaker for the pup--the title pun seemed strained to me.

I agree with Jane that the story is vivid and visual, wonderfully evoking its place (perfect for an opening tale in a collection called Ghosts of Wyoming), and our protagonist feels both native and outsider to it. This is the landscape from which he emerged; this is the landscape in which he is connected to nobody and no particular place. This dissonance seems to me the core power of the story.