"In the Village" a prose story

Elsewhere begins with a 30 page prose story of a child and her mother’s descent into insanity in a small village in Nova Scotia. The story follows the girl as she visits the blacksmith, plays with her horse Nelly, and runs errands for her grandmother. All of this occurs, however, with her mother’s sickness looming overhead. In addition to the child’s adventures, the narration involves darker images and events which cast an ominous tone and feeling for the whole story. The descriptions of the blacksmith’s forge, a barn fire, and a pervasive scream all darken the tone.

“In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner. A tub of night-black water stands by the forge. The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons and follow each other like bloody little moons to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting.”

“A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon—or is it around the rims of the eyes?—the color of the cloud of bloom on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats; something darkening over the woods and waters as well as the sky…She stood in the large front bedroom with sloping walls on either side, papered in wide white and dim-gold stripes. Later it was she who gave the scream.”

The scream detailed in the opening paragraph of the story (quoted above), is a motif that reappears several times in the story, building the feeling of a lingering madness. The scream appears at random and sometimes with no more than a sentence devoted to it.

“My grandmother’s hair is silver and in it she keeps a great many celluloid combs, at the back and sides, streaked gray and silver to match. The one at the back has longer teeth than the others and a row of sunken silver dots across the top, beneath a row of little balls. I pretend to play a tune on it; then I pretend to play a tune on each of the others before we stick them in, so my grandmother’s hair is full of music. She laughs. I am so pleased with myself that I do not feel obliged to mention the five-cent piece. I drink a rusty, icy drunk out of the biggest dipper; still, nothing much happens.

We are waiting for a scream. But it is not screamed again, and the red sun sets in silence.”

The mother is kept in a bedroom upstairs where the child’s grandmother and aunts try to take care of her. We first learn of her illness on the second page of the story:

Speaking of the mother, who was/is a dressmaker

“First, she had come home, with her child. Then she had gone away again, and left the child. Then she had come home. The she had gone away again, with her sister; and now she was home again.

Unaccustomed to having her back, the child stood now in the doorway, watching. The dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass.”

Just for context, in the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar II goes insane and thinks he is an animal after being spoken to by God.

The mother’s mental state becomes worse and worse, with a climax occurring at the same time as the barn fire in town.

“I wake up and it is the same night, the night of the fire. My aunt is getting out of bed hurrying away. It is still dark and silent now, after the fire. No, not silent; my grandmother is crying somewhere, not in her room. It is getting gray. I hear one wagon, rumbling far off, perhaps crossing the bridge.

But no I am caught in a skein of voices, my aunts’ and my grandmother’s, saying the same things over and over, sometimes loudly, sometimes in whispers:

‘Hurry. For heaven’s sake, shut the door!’

‘Sh!’

‘Oh, we can’t go on like this, we…’

‘It’s too dangerous. Remember that…’

‘Sh! Don’t let her…’

A door slams.

A door opens. The voices begin again.

I am struggling to free myself.

Wait. Wait. No one is going to scream.

Slowly, slowly it gets daylight. A different red reddens the wallpaper.”

“In The Village” is definitely the centerpiece of “Elsewhere” as the poems seem to just be asides to the main story. It sets the tone and context for the rest of the volume as well as introducing the characters that will appear in the poems. It is a very detailed and intricate work, and because of this it pretty much flew right over my head on my first read through. After a few more reads though I finally figured out what was going on in the story and everything else seemed to fall into place.