Storms of fate on the Gulf Coast

Corpus Christi: Stories

By Bret Anthony Johnston

Random House, 255 pp., $23.95

Corpus Christi, Texas, provides the setting for Bret Anthony Johnston's "Corpus Christi," a debut collection of 10 hard-eyed, life-affirming stories, but it is primarily a country of the mind. Hurricanes, poverty, accidents, loss, aging, and mental and mortal illnesses all symbolize a common fate that tests endurance and love. As one character puts it: "To understand who [anyone essentially was], you only needed to know what they'd lost. . . . Everyone could be seen that way."

"I See Something You Don't See" is first in a triptych (including "The Widow" at midpoint and "Buy for Me the Rain" at the end) that frames the collection. Fifty-three-year-old Minnie Marshall, an Avon lady, has lost her husband, Richard, and now has lung cancer, and her only son, Lee, returns from a teaching job in St. Louis to care for her. When a doctor tells Lee privately that Minnie's cancer has metastasized, Lee holds back the information, but reading his mind, Minnie says, "No more [treatment]." Lee accedes and reflects: "All of their future interactions would be strained pleasantries, empty and courteous conversations that meant nothing except I'm sorry or goodbye." Minnie, on the other hand, realizes that "all she'd ever wanted [was] someone to watch over her . . . someone who would always, always say, Don't worry, I'm here."

"The Widow" deals with Minnie's grief for Richard, who died years before; however, the main action is to arrange her own funeral with Lee, and the narrative is braided with memories of Richard's fathering and his funeral. As they visit the funeral parlor, Minnie feels that "her last duty was to be thrifty with her dying." Over Lee's objections, she wants the cheapest coffin, but on returning home insists on being cremated. Their argument leads to heartbreaking clarities: "She no longer knew his role or hers, what was required of her and what would handle itself." She wants him "to dispense with the lie that today, or any day in the last year, was normal." At the end, as he brings her soup: "He kissed her forehead, a gesture she adored but never admitted she adored for fear he would stop." She admits that she really doesn't want to be cremated; and as they reminisce, "she listened as she would to an opera, hearing not language but just his voice and its lament of time and love and doomed hopefulness."

In "Buy for Me the Rain," after Minnie's death, Lee's reunion with his former girl-friend, Moira Jarrett, alternates with memories of Minnie. The scene of his mother's dying in his arms merges with the memory of sex in present time with Moira: "He stayed beside her while the world started rushing away. He plummeted through an opening emptiness, his body surrendering as if the earth and gravity were receding."

Johnston's range of subject and virtuosity widens in the remaining stories.

Benny, "a happily married, college-educated man who's never known violence," recalls an incident when he was 14 in "In the Tall Grass." His father had just lost his job at the naval air station and suddenly, in front of Benny, had kicked and crippled a stable owner for claiming they were in arrears for stabling two horses. When they arrived back home, the police questioned Benny, but Benny denied seeing anything. Nevertheless his dad went to jail, and that night Benny's mother admitted that maybe she hadn't paid the stable rent, then made a mysterious phone call; and next day the stable owner refused to press charges, suggesting some secret history. As they picked up Dad from jail, Benny felt "the sensation that we were loose from our regular lives, floating and spiraling away from where we had been the day before." Back home he overheard his parents and "realized my father was crying." From this Benny shifts to his conclusion 20 years later that "simply, finally . . . my father made a mistake."

The primary character in "Corpus Christi," Charlie Banks, a lawyer, visits his wife, Edie, in a mental hospital, after she has broken down following a miscarriage. He waits next to Dwana Miller, a young woman carrying a motorcycle helmet and accompanied by a soldier, Omar. Dwana has rushed to the hospital to visit her brother, Donnie, just arrested for an act of psychopathic rage. Each of these five characters has a dramatized point of view, one alternating with the other. As Charlie leaves the hospital, speeding home in his Lexus, he is blindsided by a motorcycle, and recognizes Omar and Dwana as the riders. He survives the dreamlike impact and wreck, only to discover Omar dead and Dwana barely alive. Ambulances arrive. Two inspired twists end the story: First, as Charlie returns home, his mother-in-law calls from her nursing home, asking about the baby (they have never told her about the miscarriage); Charlie holds up the phone and she imagines that she hears the baby snoring, leading Charlie to conclude that life was "just a steady letting go until you found yourself in a place you never thought you'd be. In an ambulance or nursing home, in a psychiatric ward, alone." Against such bleakness, Johnston provides a second twist; the story closes back in the hospital with Edie remembering their happiness and her wading pregnant and naked into the ocean. Her realization then had been that "her life was becoming more than it had been."

These stories are relentlessly sober, large-hearted, and intense. In their pathos, to quote C.S. Lewis on Chaucer, "every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy" ("The Allegory of Love"); and yet their effect is spiritually bracing. We are human to the last.

DeWitt Henry is the author of "The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts" and editor of "Sorrow's Company: Writers on Loss and Grief." He teaches at Emerson College.