(urth) Short Story 85: Redbeard

[Marc Aramini]

“Redbeard” was first published in *Masques* in 1984 and is recollected
in *Storeys
from the Old Hotel.*

SUMMARY:

A man moves with his wife Mara and son John to a small Texas community
where he feels a definite social separation between the “old stratum” and
the new, since he has only been there “since the end of the sixties or the
Truman Administration or the Second World War. Since Something.” He becomes
friends with a man named Howie, and one day they go for a drive together,
coming across an old house the narrator remarks looks haunted.

Howie says he can’t bring himself to enter it and proceeds to tell the
story of a man named Jackson from nearby Clinton, Texas who moved into the
area. Jackson was twenty years older than his wife, Sara Sutter. After a
bus crash resulted in several injured children, a deputy asked Jackson’s
help in transporting some of the children to the doctor’s in his truck, and
Jackson suspiciously refused and tried to drive away. The Sheriff reached
under the tarp in the back of Jackson's truck and found a dead Italian girl
who might have been named Rosa, whose family owned a shoe store.

When the cops came to Jackson’s house, in the basement they found a huge
locked door that the wife said was his “personal place” – the bodies of
three women were found within. During the trial the wife testified for her
husband’s character, and the prosecutor tore into her by saying him telling
her not to enter the room was a cry for help. The narrator is bored at
several places, thinking the story commonplace and lacking in
sensationalism with only three victims. When Sarah went to visit Jackson in
jail, he had borrowed a razor to shave. He cut his own throat as she
arrived, killing himself as she looked on. She sold the house and married
again, having a child within the year. Howie speaks of the final victim,
found by children in her private sewing room. Sarah had killed herself.
Howie asks who was morally responsible – her husband, the prosecutor, the
family of the victims, or “baby blues”? The narrator says it scarcely
matters now, probably postpartum depression, and Howie reveals that she was
his mother.

COMMENTARY:

The subtlety we are used to in Wolfe does not seem to extend to plot
details in this story, but rather to the assignation of blame and the
artistic distance the narrator's voice has from Wolfe's narrative theme.
The narrator is bored and uninterested in the story with his “new”
perspective, but he is wrong in believing it is irrelevant – it is the
origin story of his friend, a deeply personal tale for him.

Obviously, as the text itself says, the story resonates with Bluebeard,
which we will recap - the aristocrat Bluebeard has a vile reputation as
well as an ominous blue beard, and no one knew what happened to his wives.
He marries the younger of two sisters and gives her a key to his chambers,
but instructs her never to enter his private room. When he is away and her
sister is present, she enters, finding his dead wives on hooks and the
floor drenched in blood, in which she drops the key. When he returns, he
sees the blood on the key which his wife dropped and threatens to behead
her, but she implores him for time to say her prayers and flees with her
sister to a locked room in the tower, and in the time she gains her
brothers come and kill Bluebeard, leaving her with all his wealth.

In Wolfe's “Redbeard”, the wife winds up on a hook of her own design, and
her unwillingness to press into her husband’s affairs leads her down a path
of self-destruction. However, the difference between old and new is
established constantly throughout the text and is worth examining. We will
return to an older story behind the Bluebeard myth soon.

POSSIBLE AMBIGUITIES:

This seems to be a pretty straightforward Wolfe story, but there are a few
things that might be subtle and suspicious, though I don't think they point
to plot trickery in this case. The narrator calls his friendship unusual,
but this could only be because of the thematic separation between the “old
stratum” and the “new” people; there is usually no connection between new
and old in the town.

The attitudes of the narrator are clearly displayed when he pigeonholes the
murder as commonplace and pathetic with only three victims, which seems
pedestrian in comparison to the murders of Gacy or Jack the Ripper. This
displays the attitudes of the “new” people – the story isn’t significant
enough to be engrossing and doesn't matter anymore, even though it resulted
in at least six deaths . Interestingly, the narrators claim that the
murders don't matter echo his opening statement: “It doesn’t matter how
Howie and I became friends, except that our friendship was unusual.”

Rather than indicate that our narrator is murderous or that some spirit of
evil lurks throughout this story as it did in “Kevin Malone”, we should see
the callous nature of the narrator as the difference between old and new.
Right from the beginning, the “new” people in town cut the grass on Sunday
morning rather than go to church as the “old” people do. This is not the
only juxtaposition.

Some examples of “new” philosophy in the text: the idea that Jackson was
crying for help and his wife was an accomplice, the concept that the deputy
could never have searched the vehicle without a warrant and made an arrest
now, the feeling that three murders make a boring, commonplace story, all
these ideas culminate in the ideology that “It doesn’t matter now.”

These are directly juxtaposed with “old” philosophy: Jackson would have
confessed if he wanted to stop, the deputy did a good job in pulling off
that tarp and seeing the evidence, the murders have the power of a horror
story – those human lives mattered.

The beginning of the story says of the old ones: “Those people are still
here, practically all of them, like the old trees that stand among the new
houses.”

The final line says, “To our right was another ruined gate, another
outdated house collapsing slowly among young trees.”

This is about as clear a statement as we can get – the new people, or the
young trees, exist among houses that are falling apart and ancient, living
in untenable circumstances with a destructive philosophy that casts blame
everywhere at once. The old are among livable houses – their philosophy did
not perpetuate an unending cycle of decay and shifting blame.

The moral question asked by Howie begging for responsibility for his
mother’s suicide is perhaps the place where the new ideas are interesting:

“I thought you said she'd killed herself.”

“That's what they would have said, back when she married Jackson. But who
killed her now? Jackson – Redbeard – when he killed those other girls and
cut his throat like that? Or was it when he loved her? Or that district
attorney? Or the sheriff? Or the mothers and fathers and brothers and
sisters of the girls Jackson got? Or her other husband, maybe some things
he said to her? Or maybe it was just having her baby that killed her – baby
blues, they call it. ...”

“Postnatal depression .. I don't suppose it makes much difference now.”

The blame here for his mother's suicide winds up being placed on Howie's
shoulders, the teller of the tale. It clearly isn't his fault, and the
assignation of blame becomes impossible in a system which must consider all
of these external forces – it almost precludes the idea of free will.

The Wolfe-Wiki posits that the second house mentioned with its ruined gate
is that of Sarah's second family.

While plot-wise it doesn't seem as if there are many unresolved questions,
there are still a few details that are perhaps not fully fleshed out:

“There had been a certain amount of trouble around Clinton going on for
years, and people were concerned about it. I don’t believe I said this
Jackson was from Clinton, but he was. His dad had run a store there and had
a farm.”

Is the trouble in Clinton just a continuing part of the cycle that carries
blame forward from the past to the new generation?

A POTENTIAL WOLF:

The internet makes research significantly easier in some ways for general
purposes than Wolfe might have enjoyed during the composition of this
story, and there is a possible source for the Bluebeard story that deals
with the Breton King Conomor the Accursed, who was also reputed to be a
werewolf. In this story, Conomor murders his wives when they become
pregnant, and the ghosts of his dead wives warn his new one when she
becomes pregnant. She is beheaded anyway, but miraculously returned to life
by a Saint, and the castle crumbles around Conomor and destroys him.

It isn't clear that Wolfe would be aware of this source story, but there
are several hints that he might have been. When ascribing guilt for the
death of the mother, our narrator asserts that it is post-natal depression,
effectively blaming Howie. The wife in the story above will be killed for
becoming pregnant. In the story of Conomir, she is somehow killed and
survives, while in Wolfe's story she survives but kills herself.

Whether or not Wolfe knew of the evolution of the Bluebeard story is open
to speculation. However, the werewolf angle certainly might have impelled
him to structure a tale around it.

SETTING: Highway 27 runs from Lubbock to Amarillo.

NAMES:

Rosa, the name of the Italian girl found under the tarp, is the latin form
of Rose

The narrator’s wife’s name, Mara, implies “bitter” or “strong”.

Howard means “defender” but the family name Howie means “hollow”.

Sarah Sutter has the most interesting name as her first name implies
“lady”, but the family name implies “shoemaker.” The dead Italian girl's
family owned a shoestore.

Jackson means God has been gracious. It is based on the name John … and,
not coincidentally ...

John is the name of the narrator's son. This creates a cyclical impression
– shifting blame from one generation and family to the next.

Wolfe has made two different comments on the story in his afterword and
introduction:

“Redbeard” is a horror story based upon a house I used to drive past every
so often. It has since burned to the ground, which may be a good thing.
Maybe I should write a story about John Gacy, the killer clown; he lived a
few miles from here, and my friend Jerry Bauer used to take pictures for
him."


 From *The Best of Gene Wolfe*:

Long, long ago, when Rosemary and I were still a young couple with small
children, we moved to a tiny town out in the country. If I remember right,
the population was under three hundred. Everyone in town – except for us –
knew everyone else. Half the time, they were at least distantly related.
Rosemary and I were outsiders, and very much so. It was much lonelier than
an isolated house would have been, and lonelier too than any city
apartment.

Often I drove past a big white house in which no one lived. Most of its
windows were broken; one shutter hung from a single hinge. The yard was
full of weeds. I never found out why the house had been abandoned or who
had abandoned it, but it has come to haunt my fiction.

It is fascinating that Wolfe casts his own portion of the experience of
being “new” in the character of the narrator, whose entire mental attitude
is clearly being criticized by the story.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Why are both the wife and the first victim related to shoes? Sarah’s last
name means shoe-maker, and the first victim’s family owned a shoe store.
What symbolic association should we assume, save that they protect feet
from the outside world and separate man from nature? Are they somehow the
symbolic “sisters” from the Bluebeard story? One of the versions of the
tale identifies one of the previous dead wives as Rosalinde, but there are
many different versions and names.

CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS:

Except for the narrator’s callous attitude, which I think is thematically
related to the callous nature of the modern world rather than a murderous
curse or a scourge of werewolves, the sinister does not seem concealed in
this tale. Wolfe's recasting of fairy stories will also occur in “The Death
of Koschei the Deathless”, “In the House of Gingerbread”, “The Little
Stranger”, and in many other tales as he moved toward fairy tales and away
from the science fictional and social elements many of his stories
maintained throughout the 1970s.
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