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Heart Songs
Annie Proulx
A highly acclaimed collection of short stories set in the great outdoors of New England, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Shipping News’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’.Just outside town, beyond the drugstore and the diner, there's another world – a wilderness – waiting to be explored. On the high, wooded hillsides there are deer to be stalked; far upriver there are quiet pools of trout, and grouse to be shot and traplines to be laid for fur. In the far-flung settlements of New England, life revolves around hunting.Whether they are yuppies from the town who think that country life is improving or natives who know all too well that it isn't, the men and women of these stories are all hunting for something better – though getting by at all is hard enough. These are men and women who live, love and lose; men and women who fall apart and who pick up the pieces, who dream useless dreams and go on dreaming whatever the disappointments.Tough and tender and irresistibly humorous, this unforgettable book takes its reader on a trail through the great outdoors to the innermost places of the heart.
HEART SONGS
ANNIE PROULX
Copyright (#ulink_10dd45c4-0c5e-5784-b1ec-bab0b5a14a72)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
This Fourth Estate edition published 2009
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 1995.
Published in paperback in 1996.
Copyright © Dead Line Ltd 1994
A collection of stories, including many from this collection, was published under the title Heart Songs and Other Stories in the United States of America in 1988 in hardback by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The following stories appeared in a somewhat different form in Gray’s Sporting Journal, “Stone City” copyright © 1979, “The Unclouded Day” copyright © 1985; Esquire, “The Wer-Trout” copyright © 1982, “Heart Songs” copyright © 1986; Harrowsmith, “On the Antler” copyright © 1983; Ploughshares, “A Run of Bad Luck” copyright © 1987.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from: The Golden Casket by Wolfgang Bauer, English translation copyright © 1964 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., reprinted by permission of the publisher; and from Love and Protest, edited and translated by John Scott, copyright © 1974 by André Deutsch Ltd, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9781857023480
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007498314
Version: 2017-01-18
Praise (#ulink_2348cf20-8a5f-5b18-b4f7-9451bda5ee52)
‘The style of Heart Songs is a long-rhythmed, almost majestic prose that can create images of perfect newness and accuracy … a polished, unflinching work’
The Times
‘Proulx’s descriptive power is such that when you’re not laughing or cringing, you’re gasping with envy’
Independent on Sunday
‘America’s most impressive new novelist … matchlessly capturing the rewards and rigours of life in the rural remoteness of America’s far north east, the stories in Heart Songs focus on characters almost elementally close to harsh landscapes and hard ways of life. Tough knowledgeableness about their circumstances goes along with a style that is elatingly fresh and crisp with sensuous delicacy’
Sunday Times
‘The writing bristles with laconic insights’
Independent
‘Proulx’s prose is monumental’
Observer
‘Proulx does not romanticise her characters, but with the quiet wisdom that informs her novels, encourages us to understand them’
Daily Telegraph
‘The precision of her observation has a large value that implies an entire culture’
Financial Times
‘Proulx’s feeling for the texture of place and characters is impeccable’
Scotland on Sunday
‘These are wilderness narratives, told with sinewy grace and humour’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Proulx is at home in natural surroundings; her gift for description is both taut and unlavish and she shows the true countryman’s respect for hunter and hunted alike. Her people are alive; the domestic detail as sharply defined as in a Dutch genre painting’
Evening Standard
‘These are magnificent wrenching pieces’
Vogue
‘Heart Songs should be bought immediately’
Beryl Bainbridge
‘Proulx peels back the raw emotions of the lost and alone. Most authors would joyously discard a limb or two in exchange for a droplet of Proulx’s lyrical and dense poetry, while the reader can only sit back and lap it up’
The List
‘Powerfully evoked wilderness … monumental prose … the reader experiences Proulx’s humanity, filtered through her controlled compassion … Annie Proulx is an American original: stark, stern, philosophical and funny’
Irish Times
‘Sharp, memorable, utterly original tales of life in rural New England’
Esquire
‘It is Proulx’s particular genius to be able to locate the remarkable within the unremarkable, the tender within the very grim’
TLS
Contents
Cover (#ua3c7aaa4-d7df-5ebe-9b1b-d798d6b581aa)
Title Page (#u0e017181-0acc-50fb-9b7e-3af0441bbb44)
Copyright (#ulink_4d1874c3-19b2-58c8-914e-dd9bcd32f2de)
Praise (#ulink_d38af92b-c8a8-5bc7-99d2-d8da4458dedf)
ON THE ANTLER
STONE CITY
1 (#ulink_0c68e1e0-90ad-5223-975c-3f5a1fd72912)
2 (#ulink_a3ded80d-a972-5ea8-9857-5debd0fdc12c)
3 (#ulink_9c46cb98-666b-57da-9314-8bde5b186fae)
4 (#ulink_60157b1f-d5e9-592e-b15c-31a97bb75750)
BEDROCK
A RUN OF BAD LUCK
HEART SONGS
THE UNCLOUDED DAY
IN THE PIT
THE WER-TROUT
ELECTRIC ARROWS
1
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3 (#litres_trial_promo)
4 (#litres_trial_promo)
5 (#litres_trial_promo)
A COUNTRY KILLING
NEGATIVES
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ON THE ANTLER (#ulink_d1f16866-2964-5edf-86de-298322e0337c)
HAWKHEEL’S face was as finely wrinkled as grass-dried linen, his thin back bent like a branch weighted with snow. He still spent most of his time in the field and on the streams, sweeter days than when he was that half-wild boy who ran panting up the muddy logging road, smashing branches to mute the receding roar of the school bus. Then he had hated books, had despised everything except the woods.
But in the insomnia of old age he read half the night, the patinated words gliding under his eyes like a river coursing over polished stones: books on wild geese, nymph patterns for brook trout, wolves fanning across the snow. He went through his catalogues, putting red stars against the few books he could buy and black crosses like tiny grave markers against the rarities he would never be able to afford—Halford’s Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, Lanman’s Haw-Ho-Noo, Phillips’ A Natural History of the Ducks with color plates as fine as if the wild waterfowl had been pressed like flowers between the pages.
His trailer was on the north bank of the Feather River in the shadow of Antler Mountain. These few narrow acres were all that was left of the home place. He’d sold it off little by little since Josepha had left him, until he was down to the trailer, ten spongy acres of river bottom and his social security checks.
Yet he thought this was the best part of his life. It was as if he’d come into flat water after half a century and more of running the rapids. He was glad to put the paddle down and float the rest of the way.
He had his secret places hidden all through Chopping County and he visited them like stations of the cross; in order, and in reverence in expectation of results. In late May he followed the trout up the narrow, sun-warmed streams, his rod thrusting skillfully through the alders, crushing underfoot ferns whose broken stems released an elusive bitter scent. In October, mists came down on him as he waded through drenched goldenrod meadows, alert for grouse. And in the numb silence of November Hawkheel was a deer hunter up on the shoulder of Antler Mountain, his back against a beech while frozen threads of ice formed on the rifle’s blue metal.
The deer hunt was the end and summit of his year: the irrevocable shot, the thin, ringing silence that followed, the buck down and still, the sky like clouded marble from which sifted snow finer than dust, and the sense of a completed cycle as the cooling blood ran into the dead leaves.
Bill Stong couldn’t leave things alone. All through their lives there had been sparks and brushfires of hatred between Hawkheel and him, never quite quenched, but smoldering low until some wind fanned up the little flames.
In school Hawkheel had been The Lone Woodsman, a moody, insubordinate figure prowling the backcountry. Stong was a wiseacre with a streak of meanness. He hunted with his father and brothers and shot his first buck when he was eleven. How could he miss, though woman-raised Hawkheel bitterly, how, when he sat in a big pine right over a deer trail and his old man whispered “Now! Shoot now!” at the moment?
Stong’s father farmed a little, ran a feed store and got a small salary to play town constable. He broke up Saturday-night dance fights, shot dogs that ran sheep and sometimes acted as the truant officer. His big, pebbled face was waiting for Hawkheel one school morning when he slid down the rocks to a trout pool.
“Plannin’ to cut school again? Well, since your old man’s not in a position to do it for you, I’m going to give you a lesson you’ll remember.” He flailed Hawkheel with a trimmed ash sapling and then drove him to school.
“You don’t skip no more school, buddy, or I’ll come get you again.”
In the classroom Bill Stong’s sliding eyes told Hawkheel he had been set up. “I’ll fix him,” Hawkheel told his sister, Urna, at noon. “I’ll think up something. He won’t know what hit him when I’m done.” The game began, and the thread of rage endured like a footnote to their lives.
In late October, on the Sunday before Stong’s fifteenth birthday, an event that exposed his mother’s slovenly housekeeping ways took his family away.
Chopping County farmers soaked their seed corn in strychnine to kill the swaggering crows that gorged on the germinating kernels. One of the Stongs, no one knew which one, had mixed the deadly solution in a big roasting pan. The seed was sown and the unwashed pan shoved beneath the blackened iron griddles on the pantry floor where it stayed until autumn hog butchering.
