New Generation of Savages Sighted in West Virginia

New Generation of Savages Sighted in West Virginia by Jim Wayne Miller This collection of nine stories begins, according to Diane McWhorter, "in standard , competent enough fashion with a coming-of-age piece. . . ." (New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987). The opening story, "The Sutton Pie Safe," is more than competent, and it is more than a coming-of-age piece. Cates Albright, the ten-year-old narrator , is out by the barn with his father, who kills a blacksnake with the intention of making his son a belt from the skin. (When Cates' father was ten, his father had made him a belt from the skin of a blacksnake). Mrs. Hanson, wife of Judge Hanson, drives up the gravel lane to the Albright home in a Buick Riviera. She has come to buy the Albrights' Sutton pie safe. Even though Mrs. Hanson discovers that the tin panels in the pie safe have been reversed ("Sometimes The above is an essay not a book review of Pinckney Benedict's book (Town Smokes. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press/Persea, 1987), but rather a close look at a review which appeared in the New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987. country people do that, reverse the tin panels," Mrs. Hanson said in a low voice, as if she were not talking to country people), she wants the pie safe. "Still, though ... it is a Sutton, and I must have it. What will you take for it?" Judge and Mrs. Hanson's anniversary is coming up, and Mrs. Hanson knows the Judge will be "thrilled with a Sutton piece." Mrs. Albright, Cates' mother, hardly knows what to say. "Take for it?" she asks. And then: "Is it worth a lot?" The narrator says, "It was an odd way to arrive at a price, and I laughed." When Cates father comes to the house and discovers why Mrs. Hanson is there, he says, "Didn't know [the pie safe] was for sale." He adds: "My father owned that." To Mrs. Hanson he says: "We aren't merchants . . . this isn't a furniture shop." His wife argues that they could repair the barn with the three hundred dollars Mrs. Hanson has offered for the pie safe. They use the barn, they don't use the old pie safe. Cates' father says to his mother: "You're not going to leave me anything, are you?" And when his wife suggests by her reaction that he 28 is being impolite, he says to her, in the presence of Mrs. Hanson: "Don't apologize for me, Sara. ... Go ahead and sell the damn [pie safe] if you want, but just don't apologize for me." Outside again with his father, who is skinning the blacksnake to make the belt, ten-year-old Cates watches Mrs. Hanson leaving, and he can tell "from the way she was walking that she must have gotten what she wanted." Cates gets sick from watching his father skin the snake, which has recently eaten a mouse. He leans over the board fence that encloses the yard, and closes his eyes. His father thinks he no longer wants a snakeskin belt. Cates wants to turn to him, and tell him that he does want the belt, he just needs a minute to recover. When ne does turn to look again, he sees that his father, in his rage and frustration, has sliced the body of the snake into three sections-from which no snakeskin belt could ever be made. The snake "looked like pieces of bicycle tire lying there, bloody bicycle tire." Walking away, Albright says to his son: "You think about that, boy. . . . You think about that, next time you decide you want something." And he walks away, "not toward the house, but toward the ruined barn." I have given a synopsis of "The Sutton Pie Safe so that the reader may better judge whether this story is, as Diane McWhorter writes, "a coming-of-age piece about a boy who witnesses some ambiguous sexual tension involving his father, a gentlewoman caller and a blacksnake, or whether something else is going on here as well. Certainly the story can be read...