• News/Talk
  • Music
  • Entertainment

Karen Russell in Granta

Listen to this Story
Larger view
Granta
Enlarge This Image

Granta literary magazine choose Karen Russell as one of their best young American novelists this year. We asked Russell to read an excerpt from "The Barn at the End of our Term," a story about powerful men who find themselves in a world that makes less sense than their own after death.

"The Barn at the End of our Term" by Karen Russell

The girl

The girl is back. She stands silhouetted against the sunshine, the greatBarn doors thrown open. Wisps of newly-mown hay lift and scatter.Light floods into the stalls.

'Hi horsies!' The girl is holding a cloth napkin full of peaches.She walks up to the first stall and holds out a pale yellow fruit.Rutherford arches his neck towards her outstretched hand. Frecklesof light float across his patchy hindquarters. He licks the girl's palmaccording to a code that he's worked out,— - —- -, which means thathe is Rutherford Birch Hayes, the nineteenth President of the UnitedStates of America, and that she should alert the local officials.

'Ha-ha!' the girl laughs. 'That tickles.'

Rebirth

When Rutherford woke up inside the horse's body, he was tied to astout flag post. He couldn't focus his new eyes. He was wearingblinders. A flag was whipping above him, but Rutherford wastethered so tightly to the post that he couldn't twist his neck to countthe stars. He could hear a clock gonging somewhere nearby, a soundthat rattled through his chest in waves. That clock must be broken,Rutherford thought. It struck upwards of twelve times, of twenty,more gongs than there were hours in a day. After a certain numberof repetitions, it ceased to mean anything.

Rutherford stared down into a drainage ditch and saw a horse'sbroody face staring back at him. His hooves were rough, unfeelingendings. He stamped, and he couldn't feel the ground beneath him.The gonging wasn't a clock at all, he realized with a warm spreadinghorror, but the thudding of his giant equine heart.

A man with a prim moustache and a mean slouch blunderedtowards him, streaked fire up Rutherford's sides with a forked quirt,shoved Rutherford into a dark trailer. The quirt lashed out again andagain, until he felt certain that he had been damned to a rural Hell.

'The Devil!' Rutherford thought as the man drew closer. He shiedaway, horrified. But then the man reached up and gave him a gentleear-scratch and an amber cube of sugar, confounding things further.

'God?'

The man seemed a little on the short side to be God. His fly wasdown, his polka-dotted underclothes exposed. Surely God would nothave faded crimson dots on his underclothes? Surely God wouldwear a belt? The man kept stroking his blond moustache. His voicesounded thick and wrong to Rutherford's ears: 'He's in, hyuh-hyuh.Give her the gas, Phyllis!'

The trailer rolled forward, and in three days' time Rutherfordreached the Barn. He has been stabled there ever since.

The barn

The Barn is part of a modest horse farm, its pastures rollingforwards into a blank, mist-cloaked horizon. The landscape is flatand corn-yellow and empty of people. In fact, the prairies look a lotlike the grasslands of Kentucky. There are anthills everywhere,impossibly huge, heaped like dirt monsters.

There are twenty-two stalls in the Barn. Eleven of the stabledhorses are, as far as Rutherford can ascertain, former presidents ofthe United States of America. The other stalls are occupied by regularhorses, who give the presidents suspicious, sidelong looks. RutherfordB. Hayes is a skewbald pinto with a golden cowlick and a cross-eyedstare. Rutherford hasn't made many inroads with these regularhorses. The Clydesdales are cliquish and pink-gummed, and thepalominos are inbred buffoons.

The ratio of presidents to normal horses in the Barn appears tobe constant, eleven: eleven. Rutherford keeps trying and failing tomake these numbers add up to some explanation ('Let's see, if I amthe nineteenth President but the fourth to arrive in the Barn, and ifeleven divided by eleven is one, then...hrm, let me start again...). He'sstill no closer to figuring out the algorithm that determined theirrebirth here. 'Just because a ratio's stable doesn't make it meaningful,'says James Garfield, a tranquil grey percheron, and Rutherfordagrees. Then he goes back to his frantic cosmic arithmetic.

The presidents feel certain that they are still in America, althoughthere's no way for them to confirm this. The yeara€"if time stilladvances the way it did when they were Presidenta€"is indeterminate.A day gets measured in different increments out here. Grassbrightens, and grass dims. Glass cobwebs spread across the tractor'swindow at dawn. Eisenhower claims that they are stabled in the past:'The skies are empty,' he nickers. 'Not a B-52 in sight.'

To Rutherford, this new life hums with the strangeness of thefuture. The man has a cavalry of electric beasts that he rides overhis acreage: ruby tractors and combines that would have causedRutherford's constituents to fall off their buggies with shock. Theman climbs into the high tractor seat and turns a tiny key, and thenthe engine roars and groans with an unintelligible hymn. Cherubsstrumming harps couldn't have impressed Rutherford more thanthese humming ploughs of the hereafter.

'Come back! That's not holy music, you dummy!' Eisenhoweryells. 'It's just diesel!'

The man goes by the name of Fitzgibbons. The girl appears to beFitzgibbon's niece. (Rutherford used to think the girl was an Angelof Mercy, but that was before the incident with the wasps.) She refersto the man as 'Uncle Fitzy', a moniker that many of the presidentsfind frankly alarming. Rutherford, for his part, feels only relief. 'Fitzy'certainly doesn't seem so bad when you consider the many infernalalternatives: Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, old Serpent, the Prince ofDarkness, the Author of Evil, Mister Scratch. Even if Fitzgibbonsdoes turn out to be the Devil, Rutherford thinks, there is somethingstrangely comforting about his Irish surname.

At first many of the presidents assumed that Fitzgibbons was God,but there's been plenty of evidence to suggest that their reverence wasmisplaced. Fitzgibbons is not a good shepherd. He sleeps in and letshis spring lambs toddle into ditches. The presidents have watched adrunken Fitzgibbons fall off the roof of the shed. They have listenedto Fitzgibbons cursing his dead mother. If Fitzgibbons is God, thenevery citizen of the Union is in dire jeopardy.

'Well, I for one have great faith in Fitzgibbons. I think he is a justand merciful Lord.' James Buchanan can only deduce, given hisadministration's many accomplishments, that this Barn must beheaven. Buchanan has been reborn as a fastidious bay, a gelding siredby that racing great Caspian Rickleberry. 'Do you know that I havean entry in the Royal Ledger of Equine Bloodlines, Rutherford? It'strue.' His nostrils flare with self-regard. 'I am being rewarded,'Buchanan insists, 'for annexing Oregon.'

'But don't you think Heaven would smell better, Mr Buchanan?'Warren Harding is a flatulent roan pony who can't digest grass. 'ThePresidency was hell,' he hiccups, 'All I wanted was to get out of thatdamn White House, and now look where I've ended up. Dispatchfor Mr Dante: hell doesn't happen in circles. This Barn is one squareacre of hell and Fitzgibbons is the devil!'

Rutherford lately tries to avoid the question. All the explanationsthat the other presidents have come up with for what has befallenthem, and why, feel too simple to Rutherford. Heaven or Hell, everypresident gets the same ration of wormy apples. Every president isstabled in a 12' by 12' stall.

Maybe we have the whole question reversed, mixed-up, Rutherfordsighs. At night the wind goes tearing through the Barn's invisible eavesand he wonders. Maybe the man is Heaven, the mobile hand thatbrings them grain and water. Maybe the Barn itself is God. IfRutherford lops his ears outwards, the Barn's rafters snap with thereverb of something celestial. At dusk, Fitzgibbons feeds them, watersthem, shuts the door. Then the Barn breathes with the promise of fire.Stars pinwheel behind the black gaps in the roof. Rutherford can hearthe splinters groaning inside wood, waiting to ignite. Perhaps that willbe the way to our next life, Rutherford thinks, the lick of bluelightning that sets the Barn ablaze and changes us more finally.Perhaps in his next body Rutherford will find his wife Lucy.

Comments

  • Comment | Refresh

  • Post a Comment: Please be civil, brief and relevant.

    Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. All comments are moderated. Weekend America reserves the right to edit any comments on this site and to read them on the air if they are extra-interesting. Please read the Comment Guidelines before posting.

      Form is no longer active

     

    You must be 13 or over to submit information to American Public Media. The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party. For more information see Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Download Weekend America

Weekend Weather

From the January 31 broadcast

Support American Public Media with your Amazon.com purchases
Search Amazon.com:
Keywords:
 ©2015 American Public Media