Cbr16bingo Horses
This collection of three novellas- “Old Mortality, “Noon Wine” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”- was originally published in 1939. Each story involves characters whose illusions — about themselves and/or their families — are eventually stripped away, forcing them to face hard realities. Some are not up to it while others find the strength to move onward.
“Old Mortality” is divided into three parts and focuses on the point of view of a girl named Miranda. She and her older sister Maria are part of a large Southern clan that loves its own family legends and its romanticized past, especially when it has to do with their father’s long deceased and beloved younger sister Amy. Amy was a great beauty, the standard by which the family has come to judge all female beauty. A number of young men wished to marry her but Amy turned all of them down, including the man she would ultimately marry — cousin Gabriel. Six weeks after the wedding, Amy died from tuberculosis. Stories of Amy’s social successes, beauty, and her tragic death are told over and over again by the family, and the little girls Maria and Miranda know them well even if they don’t see, based on a portrait, why everyone thinks Amy was so thin and lovely. The story then moves forward a few years when the girls are at boarding school. On weekends, their father sometimes fetches them to attend horse races. The family are mad for horses and racing, and on one Saturday, their father introduces them to Uncle Gabriel. Gabriel remarried after Amy’s death and has had uneven fortunes as an owner of race horses. Meeting the Gabriel of the family legends is an eye-opener for Maria and Miranda. Far from a tragic romantic hero, Gabriel is a pathetic alcoholic with a shrew of a wife, whose finances are in a shambles. In part three, Miranda, now 18 and married, runs into her father’s “old maid” cousin Eva on the train to Gabriel’s funeral, and from Eva, Miranda learns the real story of Amy. At the end, Miranda is tired of hearing the old stories that mean nothing to her and longs for her own stories, her own life unencumbered by family legends.
“Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people’s memory of the past….”
“Noon Wine” is set on a small Texas dairy farm, 1896-1905. The farm is owned by the Thompsons: Mr. Thompson, his sickly wife, and their two young sons. Mr. Thompson doesn’t much care for the farm; he considers raising dairy cows and chickens to be rather “womanly” work, and if there is one thing Mr. Thompson cares about, it is his dignity as a man, his reputation. With the boys too small to help and his wife ill, Mr. Thompson is scraping by until an itinerant laborer, a Swede named Mr. Helton, comes by looking for work. Helton is a strange young man. He rarely speaks, keeps to himself, and plays the same song over and over on his harmonica. Yet, he is adept at dairy farming, not needing to be told what needs to be done. He actually makes improvements that lead, over the years, to the Thompsons’ farm becoming profitable. Things are going well for nine years when out of the blue, a man from North Dakota named Mr. Hatch appears at the Thompson farm looking for Helton. Hatch is a disturbing man and the information he imparts to Mr. Thompson is even more disturbing. Mr. Thompson’s reaction to Hatch leads to a shocking course of events. If you are a fan of Flannery O’Connor, you ought to read “Noon Wine”.
“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” was a story I remember reading about during the pandemic because it is one of the few literary works to incorporate the 1918 Influenza pandemic into its story line. Miranda from “Old Mortality” is 24 years old and working as a newspaper reporter in a city out West, near the Rockies. Miranda lives and breathes the heaviness of the First World War. The threat of it, the threat to the young men she knows, especially a recruit named Adam whom she has been seeing, weighs on her even in her sleep. She and Adam have only know each other a short while and he is getting ready to ship out, but they are in love and they both know that death is on the horizon. And it isn’t just the war that is a threat. Miranda and Adam note the increasing number of funeral processions throughout the town and the ambulances constantly out and about. Miranda makes comments throughout the story about not feeling right, and we learn that it is not just the existential threat of war and death that is weighing on her, but influenza itself. Porter’s descriptions of the illness, the difficulty of getting an ambulance or space in a hospital, the closures of stores, restaurants and theaters, etc will sound very familiar. If you want to know what happens to Miranda and Adam, you’ll have to read the story. It is absolutely worth your while to do so.
These were excellent stories that I read through in a day. Porter uses the novella form masterfully, providing rich depictions of characters, their thoughts, and their actions in relatively short space. “Noon Wine” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” do go to some dark places, but the desire (and perhaps the need) to move forward with one’s own story and life, as in “Old Mortality”, is still there.