Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.
Welcome to the weekend!
It’s that time of year. Summer is saying a Midwest goodbye, so it’ll be a while yet before it goes — but the season has begun jingling its keys and suggested the lawn needs mowing, so its departure is imminent. The snowbirds are starting to think fondly of Tucson, and snow tire appointments are populating the calendar at the mechanic’s garage.
It’s the season of young men in loud cars making crashing plays on the football field and taking their girlfriends to apple orchards. In many ways, Fall is a seasonally mandated maturation from summer’s irresponsibilities and bare skin.
Today’s story considers the chasm between a young man’s self-granted status and reality. Currently, there appear to be two men speaking to what the pubescent male should be — one Jordan Peterson and the other Andrew Tate. (We can argue about why this is, but by the numbers, these are the two names most known to 18-year-olds.) The former represents the school of responsibility, and the latter represents the school of phantasmagoria (perpetual self-indulgence).
Steinbeck writes:
Out fifteen miles below Monterey, on the wild coast, the Torres family had their farm, a few sloping acres above a cliff that dropped to the brown reefs and to the hissing white waters of the ocean. Behind the farm the stone mountains stood up against the sky. The farm buildings huddled like the clinging aphids on the mountain skirts, crouched low to the ground as though the wind might blow them into the sea. The little shack, the rattling, rotting barn were gray-bitten with sea salt, beaten by the damp wind until they had taken on the color of the granite hills. Two horses, a red cow and a red calf, half a dozen pigs and a flock of lean, multicolored chickens stocked the place. A little corn was raised on the sterile slope, and it grew short and thick under the wind, and all the cobs formed on the landward sides of the stalks.
Mama Torres, a lean, dry woman with ancient eyes, had ruled the farm for ten years, ever since her husband tripped over a stone in the field one day and fell full length on a rattlesnake. When one is bitten on the chest there is not much that can be done.
Mama Torres had three children, two undersized black ones of twelve and fourteen, Emilio and Rosy, whom Mama kept fishing on the rocks below the farm when the sea was kind and when the truant officer was in some distant part of Monterey County. And there was Pepe, the tall smiling son of nineteen, a gentle, affectionate boy, but very lazy.
You can purchase the story here, read some here, or listen to it here.
Assuming you’ve read the story now (SPOILERS), the mother’s concern that her son was either part cow or cursed by a lazy coyote is the most “your father’s side of the family” nature-blaming for a lazy kid. From Adam and Eve to now, parents have looked at their kids and occasionally thought, “Yeesh, kiddo. Why are you the worst?” Crashing through the wall, Calvin would burst in and shout, “Original sin! Totaly depravity!” and then flap back to Geneva, Switzerland, leaving a trail of tulips behind him.
Calvin has a point. Even the best people are fallible creatures, and adolescence adds in ten liters of hormones for every tablespoon of reason. The difference between the formation of a good man and a destructive one is often whether there’s a breakwater to arrest some of a teen’s nonsense — many of us can attest to the needful and painful intervention of dad and his belt during our most idiotic episodes. In the case of our protagonist, Pepe, his father is dead, and his mother is tractable. The boy has created a fictional manhood of a hatband, green handkerchief, and a knife and gun.
Mama’s line, “A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man,” is as correct as it is tardy. Her son doesn’t know how to be a man, and she’s sent him on a doomed mission. That men have to hunt and kill the destructive boy is a matter of course — Pepe was a fool pretending at manhood. Even grown men can fall prey to their baser instincts, as observed with Nebuchadnezzar, who boasted of his deity and then was rendered a beast of the field for seven years. The instincts of Pepe — indiscriminate violence, sloth, and selfishness — are natural to all men. The ongoing subordination of those ugly elements of our nature to higher ideals and better ends make men — and destroy even the best of us should the warden lose his keys. (The same goes for the ladies, of course.)
Thanks to Steve and Eric for the suggestion.
Here’s some “bardcore” ’80s music. Lutes for the ladies and gitterns for the gentlemen:
Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.