Sometimes there’s an extra special story in a literary journal and I’ve found one that excels on all counts. Drought by Miles Harvey (Ploughshares, Fall 2004) is an exquisitely written story based on the simple premise of an adulterous affair between a young newcomer to a town, a weatherman, and the young wife of the local barber. The third person narrator is the weatherman’s boss at the local tv news station who has seen the potential in his new hire, and as well is informed about the affair and knows about the young woman’s history of marrying as a young nineteen-year old to an older man, and suffering through the loss of her young son in an accident. The lovers drive out to meet and sometimes go for rides before some passionate sex under the stars in the outlying fields. In the meantime, the town is suffering through all the devastation and loss of a two-plus year drought. Then the woman is discovered dead in her overturned pickup truck and the weatherman has survived but is changed emotionally by the event and when the rains finally come, he goes to the barber’s for a haircut and never is seen again.
The choice of pov, the story arc of the weatherman’s showing up in a town, having the affair while the drought worsens, and disappearing, and the underlying stories of the drought, the young woman’s history, and the intent and friendship of the narrator drives a perfect story arc, but it is the voice of the narrator that makes this story shine.
One night, when the grit seemed to glitter in the moonlight, as if they were driving through stardust, the weatherman and the barber’s wife wandered far from town. Zigzagging through a maze of country lanes, bounding over empty pastures, making one impulsive turn after another, they rushed past any place they could have later identified on a map. The barber’s wife had been taking more and more risks of late, leaving her seatbelt unfastened as she smashed the truck through barbed wire fences or bounced it over gullies. Sometimes, the weatherman wondered if she hoped to meet the same fate as her son, but on nights like this, those close calls only seemed to heighten her sense of purpose and desire.
Mr. Harvey uses subtle imagery, hints at changes the relationship brings to the characters (they rushed past any place they could have later identified on a map), and paces the story perfectly to a building climax (the death of the woman in the accident) as well as a gently falling arc that closes with the end of the drought and the possible involvement of the barber in the disappearance of the weatherman. There is impeccable timing to the story; the tone is somber yet exciting; the background stories of each of the four main characters–the weatherman, the woman, the barber and the narrator/manager–are all placed appropriately within the ongoing story and each reveal their own little mini-arcs that bring them to this point where they collide.
As with my first introductions to Atwood and Munro through short story, I will be looking for more from Miles Harvey, although a quick check with amazon.com rendered this single book by him based on true crime and it shows mediocre reviews, despite my own opinion that even this short story in Ploughshares, The Drought seems to indicate that Harvey holds all the tools for writing a compelling novel.
I suppose it doesn’t matter; the joy of even this one story among what is so often a slushpile of an anthology brightened my day (though this is the one that brought me to despair over my own abilities).
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology