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CAROLINE GoRDoN Born in 1895 to a prosperous farm family in Todd County, Kentucky, Caroline Gordon was one of the grand women writers ofthe Southern Renaissance. Among her nine novels are Penhally (1931), Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), None Shall Look Back (1937), and The WOmen on the Porch (1944). She published two collections ofshort fiction, The Forest ofthe South (1945) and Old Red and Other Stories (1963), as well as her Collected Stories in 1981, the year ofher death. In addition to her wide acclaim as a writer of fiction, Gordon was also well known for her essays and criticism. Her books ofnonfiction include How to Reada Novel (1957) and The House ofFiction: An Anthology ofthe Short Story (1950), which she co-edited with her husband, fellow Kentuckian and Fugitive poet Allen Tate. Gordon's stories are known for their controlled style, and several of them appeared in BestAmerican Short Stories and 0. Henry Prize Stories. In his introduction to The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, which includes "The Petrified Woman," Robert Penn Warren describes Gordon's stories as "dramatic examples of man in contact with man, and man in contact with nature; ofliving sympathy, ofa disciplined style as unpretentious and clear as running water, but shot through with glints of wit, humor, pity, and poetry." "The Petrified Woman," which first appeared in Mademoiselle in 1947 and was reprinted the following year in 0. Henry Prize Stories, shows this rare gift ofthe consummate story teller. In it Gordon takes us deep into the past to experience a family reunion charged with humor, pathos, and haunting significance. • We were sitting on the porch at the Fork-it is where two creeks meet-after supper , talking about our family reunion. It was to be held at a place called Arthur's Cave that year (it has the largest entrance in the world, though it is not so famous as Mammoth), and there was to be a big picnic dinner, and we expected all our kin and connections to come, some of them from as far offas California. Hilda and I had been playing in the creek all afternoon and hadn't had time to wash our legs before we came in to supper, so we sat on the bottom step where it was dark. Cousin Eleanor was in the porch swing with Cousin Tom. She had on a long THE PETRIFIED WoMAN 21 white dress. It brushed the floor a little every time the swing moved. But you had to listen hard to hear it, under the noise the creek made. Wherever you were in that house you could hear the creek running over the rocks. Hilda and I used to play in it all day long. I liked to stay at her house better than at any of my other cousins.' But they never let me stay there long at a time. That was because she didn't have any mother, just her old mammy, Aunt Rachel-till that spring, when her father, Cousin Tom, married a lady from Birmingham named Cousin Eleanor. A mockingbird started up in the juniper tree. It was the same one sang all night long that summer; we called him SunnyJim. Cousin Eleanor got up and went to the end of the porch to try to see him. "Do they always sing when there's a full moon?" she asked. "They're worse in August," Cousin Tom said. "Got their crops laid by and don't give a damn ifthey do stay up all night.'' '~din August the Fayerlees repair to Arthur's Cave," she said. "Five hundred people repairing en masse to the womb--what a sight it must be." Cousin Tom went over and put his arm about her waist. "Do they look any worse than other folks, taking them by and large?" he asked. The mockingbird burst out as if he was the one who would answer, and I heard Cousin Eleanor's dress brushing the floor again as she walked back to the swing. She had on tiny diamond earrings that night and a diamond cross that she said her father had given her. My grandmother said that she didn't like her mouth. I thought that she was the prettiest person ever lived. ''I'd rather not take them by and large," she said. "Do we have to go, Tom?" "Hell!" he said. ''I'm contributing three carcasses to the dinner. I'm going, to get my money's worth." "One...

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