Sworn Before Cranes: Stories

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Starkey

Sworn before Cranes: Stories by Merrill Gilfillan. The Library of the American West. New York: Orion Books, 1994. 135 pages. $20.

Merrill Gilfillan has published three books of poetry and a well-received collection of essays, Magpie Rising. Sketches from the Great Plains, and both poet and essayist have had a strong influence on the writing in his first book of short stories. Indeed, the book could have easily been marketed as a gathering of extended prose poems or of vivid essays. The stories are numerous and short: 18 in 135 pages. Throughout, insight is clearly more important than incident.

Gilfillan successfully evokes the aura of wind through prairie grass, of empty open places where ordinary events take on universal significance simply because they are the only human dramas being played on the plains' vast stage. Nothing especially amazing happens in any of these sketches, so it is to Gilfillan's credit that he is able immediately to hook the reader time after time with prose that is both lucid and quiet. Nearly always, the stories end with a whisper rather than a shout. A man picks up a hitchhiker with a passion for military history, then ditches him at a gas station when the hitchhiker uses the restroom. "That guy makes me nervous as bell," the protagonist remarks, but soon he is only thinking of stopping for a hamburger and eating it by the side of the road. A "slow-learning" ranch hand initially intends to take revenge against a disreputable shopkeeper by dumping a bag full of rattlesnakes in the man's truck. However, just before he performs the deed, he changes his mind and decides only to put a dead pronghorn kid on the man's front porch. Even the title story, which features a racially motivated murder, turns out to be a warm, almost comforting tale about the pleasures of a Christmas dinner.

Many of the stories follow Native American characters as they go about their daily routines and attempt to solve life's small problems. In "The Committee," a tribal council successfully convinces a man to move his house trailer off a sacred tobacco garden. "A Photo of General Miles" scrutinizes an old man who must make up his mind whether to leave out a portrait of his grandfather, a probable collaborator with the US Cavalry in the Indian Wars. In "F.O.B. Flicker," a woman from a traveling circus gets drunk and sleeps with a Native American. Passed out and naked, she is observed, but not once touched, by a number of boys and men. The story concludes, "And that was what [the protagonist] remembered for many long years: the eerie decorum, the slight shuffle of feet and clothing and a trace of guarded, proprietous public breathing above the heavy, oblivious, shore-like breaths of the girt."

"The Nomad Flute," at 14 pages the longest and also the most ambitious piece, details a weekend a man spends with an eccentric family after his fan belt breaks in the austere sagebrush flats of Montana. The family runs a small farm and operates a ferry that crosses the Missouri river. They treat the narrator kindly, and he learns that the wife--gracious, yet slightly wistful--grew up very near his hometown in Ohio. The story's zing comes at the end. The narrator learns that when the woman was much younger,

one October night her parents and his parents came home from a

social outing and found her with the boyfriend [a prominent

Methodist minister's son] in his car, parked in the driveway with

the motor running. Carbon monoxide had got them. The girl was

unconscious. The boy turned out to be dead.

While other stories in the book achieve a certain sadness, none is as poignant as this extended piece.

That said, one can hope that Merrill Gilfillan will continue to expand his stories, without losing the precision of imagery and dialogue he has already mastered. Sworn before Cranes delivers a collection of well-written, atmospheric vignettes, and that accomplishment is not to be belittled. The talent evident in this book, however, promises much more for the future.