One of the things we're doing here this month at the EWN is hosting (and participating in) weekly discussions of specific short stories. The discussions will focus on two collections in particular, with up to around a dozen people discussing one story from each collection each week. While I'll link to the individual's blogs or website when I list their names as headers for their thoughts in each discussion, sometime during this first week, I will put up a post that lists everybody's bio. And a nod to Ed Champion whose own roundtable discussions certainly were an influence on these posts.
One of the two collections is a forthcoming collection (which I know makes it difficult for those not in this group of people to chime in their thoughts in the comment sections) from Press 53. It is Pinckney Benedict's Miracle Boy and Other Stories! Personally, I have been waiting for this book for a good half dozen years, if not longer. I ate up Benedict's other two collections, Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard back in the late 80's and early 90's, as well as his novel, Dogs of God.
The story from this collection that we'll be discussing this week is both the first story in the collection, and the title story, "Miracle Boy."
Note: There will be spoilers in this discussion as the story is discussed in great detail.
“Miracle Boy” by Pinckney Benedict
Charles May
When three boys want to see the scars of someone named Miracle Boy, it seems
pretty obvious that we are in for a story about sin and redemption. Jesus, after all, is the number one “miracle boy” in Western culture, and if you are a doubting Thomas, you want to see the stigmata. The problem, it seems to me, with writing a story about this central Christian mystery, is how to bring it off without being too obvious, or lacking that, how to bring it off daringly in such a different way that the reader doesn’t mind.
I like the fact that Benedict makes his Miracle Boy a soft and jiggly kid who, when beaten down, says “It’s miracles around us every day…Jesus made the lame to walk…and Jesus, he made me to walk too.”
I can’t resist the scene of the father scrambling up the silage wagon like a monkey and rummaging around in the silage to find those feet while the boy lies there knowing what his old man was looking for. “He knew exactly.” That’s a good short line, it seems to me, to make me frighteningly filled with admiration for both the father and the boy.
And that silent scene when Miracle Boy’s father brings him over to Lizard’s house and sits out on the porch while Lizard’s mother brings iced tea and Coca-Colas to them works well, for, when such a “mean” thing happens, what is there to say? The difference between a house with a woman in charge and one with a man is the difference between Geronimo and Eskimo’s “I don’t give a damn” attitude and Lizard’s nagging guilt. I like those shoes dangling up there on the high-powered wire; they evoke just the right touch of iconic mystery.
Lizard’s climbing up that pole while driving nails just below his body to step up on creates a powerful image of the cross, as Lizard, trying to atone, pulls himself up higher and higher by his own bootstraps, as it were, to try to reach the holy grail of those grimy shoes. Those flat-faced, indifferent cows grazing just below Lizard seems just the right audience. As the nails tear at his flesh and wobble under his feet, the reader grunts and groans with him. When he reaches the top and frees the shoes, he can see his whole world around him, and it is not as big as he thought it was. He knows he is in the palm of the hand of something; he just doesn’t know what.
In the final scene, Miracle Boy’s father tells Lizard, “Your Mommy may not know what you are…But I do.” And we do too—for Lizard is suffering man, trying to atone for his sins. It is inevitable that he looks at Miracle Boy with “curious eyes, seeing him small, like a bird or a butterfly.” And even though we are not surprised that Lizard would hold out the shoes like a gift, and even though this risks lapsing into the banal, Benedict brings it off, it seems to me, ending the story with echoes of the Southern masters of this kind of story—Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.
John Fox
Charles, that's a good reading of "Miracle Boy," indicating the Christian allusions inherent in witnessing wounds and pounding nails.
But my dislike for the story stems from the ending, where I'll have to disagree with you -- I don't really hear the echoes of Flannery O'Connor (can't speak as authoritatively for Welty). Flannery ends stories with mass murders, with the Holy Ghost descending in fiery violence, with stolen legs and child abduction and beaten husbands -- all utterly unsentimental. Returning shoes to a kid you've stolen them from strikes me as the type of nice, do-gooder act that Flannery would upchuck upon.
Although Lizard has to work hard physically to gain redemption, I still felt redemption came too easily. Even though returning the shoes is a nice gesture, I can't help but feel it's a cheesy one. (Let's not consider what this says about me -- the fact that I can't see the goodness of good deeds and call it a day. Maybe I'm too suspicious. Also, probably allergic to kind acts used as climaxes in short stories). Can I also say -- although this might be insensitive or wrongheaded -- that the themes of sin and redemption in religious contexts have been overworked? I'm always more interested when religion meets up with slightly more virgin territory (like paranoia, if you're dying for an example).
My problem with "Miracle Boy" is the same problem I have with "Mercy," aka, one with the miniature horses. If I were to go all Guardian on this story and offer a Digested Read, it's "cranky father hates tiny horses and threatens an equestrian genocide if they trespass, but when they lick his face he becomes a kind and gentle father, quick to laughter." Same pattern in both stories: Sour actions followed by redemptive act. However, neither story earns the ending.
Let's call upon Jorge Luis Borges, the perfect go-to man for all literary emergencies and labyrinthian discussions. In "Other Inquisitions," he critiques Nathaniel Hawthorne for attaching morals to each of his stories: "One aesthetic error debased [Hawthorne]: the Puritan desire to make a fable out of each imagining induced him to add morals." So when Hawthorne writes a story about a snake in a man's stomach which torments him for years, he can't stop there -- he has to add that the snake is a type of envy or some other evil passion. Or when tragedies strike a man, the man first blames others, then discovers it's his own fault -- and Hawthorne adds, "Moral, that our welfare depends on ourselves." In contrast to these tales, Borges praises one Hawthorne story, "Wakefield," in which a man leaves his wife for no reason and sets up camp in an adjacent apartment and spies on her but never contacts her. After years and years, he returns. It's mysterious, haunting, and strikes at the inscrutable human soul.
This is what I'm saying: I prefer the "Wakefield" stories over the stomach snakes and moral-heavy tragic lessons. Luckily for me, I think Benedict journeys into "Wakefield" territory quite frequently. I think one example might be "Pig Helmet and the Wall of Life," which ends with the hypnotic revolutions of the death-defying motorcyclists. That feels like a view into the abyss, into something strange and marvelous and at least partially inexplicable.
I wouldn't say Benedict writes only allusions (but "The World, The Flesh, and the Devil" certainly counts), and I wouldn't say that he offers moral lessons too explicitly, but I will say that the problem and solution of "Miracle Boy" feels too neat and simplistic. It's certainly more difficult to pull off a genuinely redemptive or happy ending, and I don't think "Miracle Boy" provides the right content between the poles of beginning and end to justify the distance traveled.
Steven McDermott
Building on Charles' take that "Miracle Boy" is a story progressing from sin to redemption, you can see that the story is structured through the following stages: sin, punishment, guilt, atonement, and forgiveness with the presumption of redemption as the fulfillment of the arc. The two tractor scenes are interludes (and flashbacks) to that five-part arc and it might be interesting to discuss how those scenes function in the story.
I thought the key turning point in the story was when Lizard's focus shifts from his own discomfort seeing the shoes dangling from the wire to wondering how Miracle Boy felt about the shoes:
He figured everybody in the school saw those shoes. Everybody knew whose shoes those were. Lizard figured that Miracle Boy must see them every day on his way home. He wondered what Miracle Boy thought about that, his shoes hung up in the wires, on display like some kind of trophy...he wondered if Miracle Boy ever worried about those shoes. He took up watching Miracle Boy in school for signs of worry. (p. 5)
Leaving aside the obvious Christian overtones and symbolism of the story, I think this coming to empathy is the stronger (and perhaps more universal) arc of the story: selfish bully becomes empathetic friend. Although that arc has also been as over-trod as the allusive sin to redemption one. In that regard I agree with John on the moralistic aspects of the story and the difficulty of earning such an ending. Might have been easier to make such moves in Hawthorne's day, but we are too well-read and too well-schooled in literary analysis these days to give the writer such an easy win, particularly when the structure, the symbolism, and the message are so prominent.
Thought, however, that the names were a great move. Lizard, Geronimo, and Eskimo Pie. Consider how different the story becomes if they boys names were Jim, Bill, and Fred? (Or what if they'd been Matt, Mark, and Luke?) Using the nicknames puts the story on a different plane, establishes a different tone, one that encourages readers perhaps to drop their guards as they are being confronted with a story about a Miracle Boy. The antagonist being named Lizard though felt overdone. Wish it had been Eskimo Pie instead.
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