Anne Ryan, Fear

2953 Anne Ryan, available writings index

“Fear.” Botteghe Oscure 10 (1952) : 295-302
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The middle years of the life of Seth Metzler were not positive, settled or in any way easy. One winter was passed n the mountains for the lungs were touched — a whole winter of idleness when very little money could be spent. For weeks there was nothing to do but hunt and after that, sleep with the heavy sleep of weariness, too deep for dreaming.
All summer Seth Metzler and his wife Tania had lived in a log cabin on the side of a lonely ravine far from other dwellings. It was pleasant for Tania to rest in the silence and the heat of those echoing weeks. She was anxious to have her husband get well but it left them poor, inactive, and with a dull ache in the center of their days which they could not name nor understand. They both had been brought ip in a town twenty miles off, situated between the arms of a great river and they were really used to gaiety and activity. In October the stream which had been piped into their log-house froze in the first hard frost, and it was necessary to find a place in the center of the village. There were only a dozen houses there which were kept open all year; the others had wooden shutters put up and the summer people went away. Natives sitting on the sunny bench outside the smithy were only too anxious to tell of the months which [296] were coming, deep months, months of silence, of fierce winds, of roads blocked with icy drifts when all the life centered around the triangular ‘green’ which grew wider with storms. Then, they said, the wine-glass elms would crackle above the houses, summer would be forgotten, wheels would be forgotten, people would go on snowshoes and only sleighs could get through. But all this was to be much later when the real winter would set in. Seth expected a month of gunning before that time. He liked to sit in the warm, thin air and talk of the wild creatures he hoped to kill. All the men were fierce, sly and secretive about hunting. Whenever a deer was actually brought down there was a village celebration. The great head of the animal was tied on the top of a car which was driven on the roads up and down; the hunters were a little drunk and yelled to the smiling faces looking out at them through the windows. Everyone could come to the feast where the meat was roasted at a great open-air fire near the brick walls of a torn-down kiln. The antlers were hung over the door of the hunter — the fantastic and beautiful antlers which had been the only weapon and yet the crown of the wild creature dashing in the break. Two or three deer were caught in a year, but of the small creatures any amount were taken.
Seth Metzler’s wife listened to the talk and she grew excited although traps, guns and limp, defenseless animals were foreign to her. She walked about the village or ran to her neighbors in the gusty autumn air and talked about pelts, numbers, even prices. All at once she was wise with the secrets of the track. The whole life of the woods fascinated her. She seemed bursting with those commonplaces known to the simplest country child. She was a pretty woman and everyone looked at her when she talked because her eyes were so full of expectancy; she had a pale, oval face, a broad underlip which gave her mouth an impish expression and a low, square forehead on which the hair grew as thick as a wig. At night her husband stroked her beautiful [297] warm, brown hair. As he sank his hands in the mass of it he thought of fur, of flesh that was not yet cold, and of that silent dark hour before daybreak when the wood stirs and the smallest scratching is heard among the leaves. «Tania», he would say in the night, «yesterday I found a track where no one has ever been...». He loved the secrets of the forest or of the swamp; he became as cunning as nature. «It runs down through a glen on the edge of the swamp and there are great round ‘pies’ there, hollowed out, the round nests of little creatures. Those ‘pies’ prove that the glen has never been hunted or they would be caved through in some corner. It’s one of the wildest places. Yesterday it was gold in the sun... the leaves were falling... I wish I could have taken you there...».
She couldn’t walk so far. «How would I ever get back?» she said. They talked a long time in the darkness.
—
Ira and Marvin, two hunters, were going with Seth to hunt deer. It was cold and icy in the woods now and Tania got up at three o’clock to put together bread and meat in great slices two inches thick. They were to be gone all day. Tania went back to bed and slept until the sun was in the sky. When she woke the fire in the little black pot-stove had gone out, and the thin shaft of sun was the only heat. It was warmer outside. She put on a cape and knocked on her neighbor’s door; the kitchen there had a brisk fire. Gertrude was rubbing linen on a board and the starch was just boiling over. Tania flew to help; they lifted the iron kettle together, smiling through the steam, thick as milk. Because she wanted to stay, Tania rolled up her sleeves and began to walk around. She thought of her husband in the wood, of the sound of the gun, of the struggle and the cunning. Gertrude could see nothing in that. «Shucks, what’s a deer, if they get it or if they don’t», she said with a sulky expression. She was an easy-going woman. After her work she settled herself with a great sigh. Tania stayed until after- [298] noon. They talked to each other as women always do in the country. They talked of fire, of water, of the bearing of children, of mourning for the dead. When Gertrude went to sleep inadvertently in her chair, Tania crept out of the house. How lonely she was! She sat inside her own window and watched. The chipmunks hopped on the long side porch. The giant spider was spinning a web in an angle. After it grew dark and everything was silent she thought she heard a scratching on the boards outside, A little noise frightened her. Yet all she saw was a skunk. «It’s hungry», she said to herself. She threw it a ham bone without making much noise fearing to disturb it, but it was instantly alarmed and a quick stench arose. It must be quite near. Now she would have something to tell her husband, and she felt she must stay awake near the window and call to him not to come in by the porch, that there was a skunk under the floor. So in the night surrounded by little beasts, Tania waited... She thought, «Trees are felled... made into walls, it was called a house... yet a house like this was still part of the woods, leaves fell around it, timid feet hurried after the winds about it; there was something alive and whispering in the eaves...»
At ten o’clock she heard a step on the rough stones of the path and a shout of huntsmen still loud as they were in the woods. She leaned out and called, «Seth, Seth, go around the back way».
«What? What’s the matter?»
«There’s a skunk».
He knew the tiny beasts terrified her. There she stood holding open the door. They both smiled. There is something humorous in a skunk. «If you ever got that on you!» and she began to breathe fast with excitement and a fearful expectancy.
They were both wide awake and stayed up half the night. Because they were in love with each other they seemed to have a year to recount instead of a day.
[299]
Seth hung up the hare, the two partridges and the quail in far corner. A close odor of fur and as of wet, green ferns spread through the room.
«We met a man in the woods», said Seth, while he ate quickly and wolfishly; the great, cool air seemed still to be flowing in his empty body. «We came upon his hut on the side of the steepest climb, fifteen miles from here». Propping her head Tania looked at the thin body of her husband, wondered how he could have walked so far and watched his mouth with the same interest, as a child who knows that a story is about to come out, for there is a difference in a told story, something ancient, more intense, and with nothing of being able to look ahead in the narrative, no cheating at all.
«I sat a while with the man», said Seth, «while Marvin and Ira went to look at the trap. I wanted to know how he came there and why he lived in that lonely place. There is always something in back of a life like that... He had been a farmer. He had some sort of an accident in his life... For twenty years he had provided, saved and replenished. His family grew up. At last he had only a daughter left, a child about ten years old, all the other children had gone away and he lived contentedly with his wife, her mother, and the little girl. One summer between the planting and the harvest, when it grew very hot and there was not much to do in the afternoons, he proposed a trip to them. It had always been his dream to live by the sea for a few weeks. None of them had ever been near the ocean. It must be a queer slant to have heard of a great natural wonder like the ocean and never to have seen it... After a while the whole family relished the idea. He told me how, when it was hot, they imagined to themselves what the wind rushing among the waves would be like, or how the sand would feel under their feet which were only used to stubble or the caked fields. He said that the grandmother couldn’t wait to get to the seaside town they had selected and she made all sorts of excuses to go [300] before the time set. She told them that the child was pale, that it was hotter than ever before, and that now was exactly the time to go. So she took the child and went on ahead. By the time the parents followed her in a week, the girl knew all the rocks, the jetties, and could climb into fishing dories which were pulled up on the sand. The sight of the water was a miracle to them. The old man says when he closes his eyes he can gaze out on it yet, and its green is better than the green of the woods... But he opens them sadly enough, for he has another reason for remembering. A terrible thing happened to them on that journey. One evening, the grandmother came frantically to them sitting on some wooden steps along the sand facing the water; the child had jumped in a boat, an empty boat which had loosened from a rock, and was drifting beyond the sound of a voice. Some fishermen, when they heard the noise, came around the dunes. It looked very simple to go out a short distance in tha calm water and tow in the boat. Nobody hurried because it was all so easy with no wind. At last the mother and father saw the fishermen pulling out steadily. It was a clear, translucent evening. The sky was colored with the same pale light as the sea. When they got to the child there was some commotion. One man jumped over into the boat and seemed to lay the child on his knees. She was dead. She fell limply and the men could not fathom it at all. It bewildered them. More people came and stood about the shore. A doctor came. As soon as he saw his child actually dead the father began to run up and down in a frenzy, fell, shouted, and knelt in the water and beat the waves with his fists... I thought when he told me about beating the waves», said Seth, «that it was very natural and not the least strange or ludicrous — it’s just what we do every day when we beat our will and our infinitesimal wishes against forces greater than even the earth — and the earth is really great and powerful. You understand me, Tania, you see what I mean?» Tania turned her deep eyes. «Here was something that a man could [301] see, the immense water which in some way had taken his child, and in his frenzy he threw himself against that force, he beat it with as much strength as he had... and of course it flowed back the next instant running in its own path without a mark at all, nothing at all.
«The doctor was curious. He wanted to perform an autopsy, but he was a country doctor and not very courageous. He had to put down a cause, so he wrote a Latin phrase which signified died of fear — for that’s what the child died of. Out of sound of a voice, with only the deep still water beneath her, fear had taken her...
«They all went home. The tasks went on for a while in the same round, but the grandmother died of grief. One day the farmer ran off into the woods. He walked on and on into the deepest part. The silence, the security there attracted him. He began to live like the animals, timid of sound. To this day he doesn’t know what became of his wife. He is far from where all these things happened. Perhaps it is two or three states away. He is old. He chatters».
Tania thought of the child, of the tragedy that was so simple and so commonplace and with nothing heroic about it. She went and stood near her husband, knelt down and leaned on his knees, and the tenderness in her gesture made him divine her thoughts exactly. The meaning of suffering, the meaning of hope were engulfed for Tania; as the sea had spread out before the frenzied man time spread out before her. All the days she had to live with Seth were shrunken, almost defeated by their smallness and briefness. She felt all at once the same anger as the man on the shore.
The next day she got up while it was still dark. Seth was going into the woods again. Ira came up to the house and Tania called through the window, «The back door, Ira, there’s a skunk under the porch!» And her laugh rang. The first streaks of dawn were on the gray barks of the trees. The hunters’ steps resounded. They walked straight into the woods. Silence closed over them.
[302]
Now Tania had something to think about in the long days. Although there was no ocean near, she imagined when she paused in the quiet room, even in the midst of the morning, that she could hear an ancient sea, an ebb tide, and the sound of the small green waves breaking on pebbles, and further out, drifting in the scaly light of evening with no storm at all, no terror, on a sea like grass, a boat wherein a child sat upright, afraid.

passages : underlined, marked, and (occasional) comments

yet a house like this was still part of the woods, leaves fell around it... there was something alive and whispering in the eaves
6

We met a man in the woods...
for there is a difference in a told story, something ancient, more intense, and with nothing of being able to look ahead in the narrative, no cheating at all
12

There is always something in back of a life like that
The sight of the water was a miracle to them. The old man says when he closes his eyes he can gaze out on it yet, and its green is better than the green of the woods... But he opens them sadly enough...
As soon as he saw his child actually dead the father began to run up and down in a frenzy, fell, shouted, and knelt in the water and beat the waves with his fists...
13

so he wrote a Latin phrase which signified died of fear
14

He is far from where all these things happened. Perhaps it is two or three states away. He is old. He chatters.
happened, or matters ?
15

Story in three parts : the initial setting, a story within the story, and the aftermath.

Seth and his wife Tania live away from town, in the mountains, for Seth’s convalescence. He tells her of a track he’s found, “where no one has ever been,” and joins with two hunters Ira and Marvin to hunt deer.
In their absence and because her stove fire has gone out, Tania visits a neighbor, Gertrude — “They talked to each other as women always do in the country.”
Seth returns late at night, with a hare, two partridges, and a quail, and tells of an encounter with a man who lived in a hut, in a remote place in the mountains. That man’s story is told — a trip to the sea with his mother, wife and daughter; the daughter’s death (of fright) alone in a boat. The father kneels in the water and beats the waves with his fists...
They return to their home. The grandmother dies of grief, the man himself runs off into the woods, “far from where all these things happened... He is old. He chatters.”
Tania reflects on the tragic story, her days with Seth now shrunken; she feels the same anger as the man who beats the water with his fists.

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