A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

A MONKEY’S PAW

Take the Whites, a modest but happy family. A happy-enough family. It’s just the three of them: mother, father, and son. The son works in the local factory. If he’s cross about supporting his parents; if he chafes at his sexless nights or wonders about a youth devoid of carousing and petty criminality; if he’s upset about certain premature afflictions brought on by his labors (that tricky knee, the painful knot at the base of his spine) at the age of twenty-two, he never brings it up. He was not born into a place or time when sons kiss their parents goodbye, gently chide their mother’s hanky-dabbed tears, and stride off into lives of their own.

They live in a cottage, though it’s not the thatched, tidy dwelling the word “cottage” ordinarily brings to mind. It sags in a slushy, wind-haunted remoteness. The Whites have not been offered much in the way of choices.

And yet, they don’t bicker. They don’t get snappish over minor domestic failings. These quarters cramped and damp, this road rendered impassible by mud more than half the year, strike them as inevitable, and they console themselves with vague references to how it could have been worse (although it’s difficult to say what “worse” might entail). There is no hint among them of Why did I let you bring me here? or When will you die, so I can escape?

The visitor who arrives one mucky night is not a stranger; or not exactly a stranger, though he is in fact strange. He’s an old friend of Mr. White’s, a man who, when young, was prone (more so than Mr. White) to wild and defiant inclinations. In the way of certain trouble-prone boys, he eventually joined the army. He’s been away on military errands for more than two decades, most recently in India. He’s spent the last twenty years helmeted, taciturn, a defender of the Empire, in realms of superstition, of blessings and curses, of darkly magical acts that are usually faked but can seem, on occasion, to be not exactly genuine, but … other than counterfeit, as well.

The visitor brings with him a gift, the severed paw of a monkey, which he claims has the power to grant three wishes.

The Whites are unsure about how to receive this particular present. They could use three wishes — a single wish would be riches beyond calculation. But, really. This gruesome, withered little thing, its dead, brown-black fingers curled into themselves? It would seem that Mr. White’s old friend has lost his mind, which is not unusual among men who’ve been long in strange and remote places.

Still, it’d be impolite to refuse it. Right?

Mr. White takes the paw into his own hand, and is astonished and appalled when it convulses, ever so slightly, upon contact with the flesh of his own palm.

Before he can cry out, though, the visitor has snatched it back. He says, in an unsteady voice, that he was about to commit a crime. He’s been unable to rid himself of the paw, he’d thought he could free himself by giving it to a poor, innocent family …

The Whites just stare at him. What is there to say?

The visitor tells them he bemoans the day he ever laid tired eyes on the monkey’s paw.

With a spasm of lunatic resolve, he throws it into the fireplace.

Mr. White just as quickly retrieves it, singeing his own fingertips. He’s embarrassed for his friend. He assures him that a gift is a gift. He says he’s always been drawn to exotica, and there’s not much of that in this neighborhood.

The visitor, looking gaunt and terrified as a muskrat in a trap, stumbles to the door. Before taking his leave, he warns the Whites not to wish on the paw, and implores them, should they find themselves wish-prone, to restrict their requests to the most sensible possible desires.

Then he’s out the door. The rain absorbs him back into the night.

Mother and son are quick to render their verdict. They break out in gusts of laughter.

Sensible wishes? Please send us a new dustpan? Grant us, if you will, fewer roaches in the larder?

Mr. White remains silent. He closes the door, through which rain is blowing like a swarm of hornets.

He could swear he felt the paw clench when it was given to him. He’s holding it again, though, and it’s inert as death itself.

Mr. White can manage only a muted protest on the poor man’s behalf. “He’s been harmed by too much strangeness, you didn’t know us when we were boys…”

Mrs. White snatches the paw from him, mutters an invented incantation, and says, “I wish…”

She pauses. She claims she has nothing to wish for (she who washes dishes in an old iron pot, who does her best to coax fires out of soggy logs).

“I wish for two hundred pounds,” she says eventually, two hundred pounds being the sum still owed on the cottage. With two hundred pounds, this warren of dim, low-ceilinged dankness could be theirs.

A more sensible wish is difficult to imagine.

Nothing happens. No wad of bank notes manifests itself in the sugar bowl, no coins rattle down the flue.

They take themselves off to bed.

Once Mr. and Mrs. White are settled under the quilts together, she does not wonder, even as sleep descends, why she married a man who’d convey her, after their modest village wedding, to a place like this. (Should she have guessed, when he appeared at their marriage ceremony in his father’s mothballed suit, when he insisted that a carriage was a needless expense?) Mr. White, a troubled sleeper, does not inquire inwardly, as he turns this way and that, trying to find a sleep-friendly position, about his choice of a wife so lacking in ambition or faith. He does not ask himself, Why would full ownership of this hovel so much as cross her mind, even in jest?

* * *

The next morning, the son leaves for work. By late afternoon, a representative of the factory arrives to inform Mr. and Mrs. White that there’s been an accident. Their son has been snatched up by his machine, as if he were the raw material for some product made of manglement, of bone shards and snapped sinews, of blood-spray that turned quickly, before the eyes of the other workers, from red to black.

The man from the factory is appropriately, professionally sympathetic. He knows there’s no compensation for a loss like this. The factory owners do, however, maintain a practice of paying the families of the men who are, on occasion, taken by the machines. It’s not much, God knows, but the company is prepared to offer the following sum of money to the boy’s parents …

You do not, of course, need me to tell you the actual figure.

Nor do you need me to tell you — certainly not in detail — about the boy’s grief-deranged mother, who made the wish in the first place; about how she, late one night — several days after what remains of her son has been sealed into its box (there was no viewing of the body), after the box has been interred in the weedy churchyard — takes up the monkey’s paw and calls, into the empty parlor, into the rain beyond the parlor, “Bring him back.”

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens immediately.

It takes several hours for the Whites, after they’ve gone to bed, to hear the sound of approaching footsteps, coming from outside. It takes only moments, however, for them to realize that the footsteps possess a measured slowness, an aspect of drag, as if each step did not involve boot-sole leaving the surface of the ground and so has to be painfully gained, a slide through the sludge, before the next step can be negotiated.

Both of them understand it at the same moment. It’s a long walk from the cemetery.

Mrs. White rushes down the narrow stairs, with Mr. White behind her.

“He’s back!” she declares.

He can barely bring himself to respond. “It’s back.”

The mauled corpse, the creature made now of shattered bone and crushed mask of a face (the creature who had once toddled giggling after a rubber ball, who had skated cheerfully on ponds with its friends) is back. It is, even now, creaking through the garden gate.

It has been summoned. It still recognizes the light in the window.

As Mrs. White struggles to unbolt the door, Mr. White takes up the monkey’s paw. He’s prepared to shout, “Make it go away.”

And yet, he remains silent. He knows what he should do. But he can’t bear the idea of his wife throwing open the door and finding nothing but wind outside. He’s not sure he could survive the sorrow and fury she’d aim at him when she turned back from the empty threshold.

So Mr. White stands in the middle of the room, holding the monkey’s paw tightly in his hand, as his wife throws the door open, as he and his wife behold what stands before them, expecting to be welcomed in.

* * *

They have lived together now, the three of them, for more than a year. The creature sprawls, during the days, in the upholstered chair, beside whatever flicker of fire has been coaxed from the wet logs. When night arrives, the creature hauls itself wordlessly upstairs, clumping on each tread, where it remains in its bedroom (there’s no telling whether it sleeps) until morning comes again, when it resumes its place at the fireside.

Still, it is their child. What’s left of him. The Whites have covered the parlor walls with every old photograph they have: their son tiny in a snowsuit, grinning among a swirl of windblown white flakes; their son somberly adolescent in a bow tie, posing for the school’s photographer; their son smiling nervously beside the unsuitable girl (the hefty one, sly-eyed and morally slack, who is now the drunken wife of the town butcher) he took to his first dance.

The Whites burn incense to cover the smell. When spring arrives, they fill the house with lilacs and roses.

Mr. and Mrs. manage, as best they can, a version of their former days. They joke and reminisce. Mrs. White produces a mutton stew every Friday, although the creature no longer wants, or needs, to eat.

Usually, it stares blankly at the struggling fire, though every now and then, when some conversation has been broached, when Mother or Father asks if it wouldn’t like another pillow, wonders if it remembers that trip they took, years ago, to that lake in the mountains, it raises what remains of its head, and trains on them its single, opaquely opalescent eyeball, with an expression not so much of anger as confusion. What crime has it committed? Its jailers are kind enough, they make their attempts at offering comfort, but why do they keep it here, what exactly did it do that was so wrong?

Days pass into nights, and nights into days. Nothing changes, either within the house or outside, where gray skies and the bare branches of trees drop their reflections into the puddles on the road.

The effort required to continue in this altered world shows, however. Mrs. White, on more than one evening, wonders wistfully over the whereabouts of Tom Barkin, the man she might have married, and the fact that the words “might have married” mean only that she was (as Mr. White points out) one of a dozen girls with whom Tom Barkin flirted shamelessly, seems to strengthen rather than deter her convictions about renounced possibility. Mr. White finally tells her he does not like, has never liked, her habit of whistling as she goes about her duties, but finds afterward that her grudgingly obedient cessation produces a strangled silence worse than the whistling had been. The undercooked bacon is no longer consumed by Mr. White without comment. His infrequent baths no longer produce assurances that there’s something nice about a man’s natural smell. His stories are more often suffered, by Mrs. White, with an undisguised glaze of boredom.

The creature that sits staring into the smoking and smoldering logs appears to take no notice.

Mr. and Mrs. White remind themselves: This is still their son. They stand by him, as they must. They have that, at least, by way of virtue. They willed him into being, not once, but twice.

And so, the fire is kept alive. The stew is prepared every Friday. The occasional visitor is discouraged — the Whites are, they claim, simply too busy to receive, these days. There are moments, though, when Mrs. White imagines how much easier her life would be if Mr. White were to die of his compromised heart, and launch her into the simpler realm of widowhood, where nobody minds about whistling, or how the bacon is cooked; where Mr. White’s sour, sweaty pungency would evaporate; where she would not be asked to feign amusement over the same story, told one more time. There are moments when Mr. White imagines his wife going away with Tom Barkin, who’s old now, who’s lost half his teeth, who still flirts with girls even as they recoil in horror. She’d be an adulteress, and no one would blame him for maintaining a determinedly cheerful demeanor in his solitude. He’d be a figure of sympathy. An acquaintance or two might even venture the long-withheld opinion that, as everyone in the village agrees, Mr. White really could have done better. And there are a few youngish local widows who don’t seem like the kind of women who’d object to a man’s smell, or wouldn’t appreciate a rousing, well-told tale.

It would be easier, it seems, if there were fewer of them on the premises.

The Whites, all three of them, know exactly where the monkey’s paw resides — on the top shelf of the cupboard, beside the cracked mixing bowl. They know, they always know, all of them know, it has one more wish to grant.