From Birds of A Lesser Paradise: Stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman
Scribner – March 2012
This story certainly spreads out from where the first two seem to be rooted, and grows casually into a full gallop.There is a man who who has just hit a hole in one, on his homemade golf course. His daughter Mae is thrilled, she stands by watching this happen, it seems like a moment out of time, just something that happened.
Mae is only mentioned once by name once, and then becomes the tent pole that holds this story up. Dad gives tours of his swamp, and Mae has only just returned after attempting to live outside the confines of this rural life that Dad has so gloriously grown to love. Is it possible to forget the outside world and just live off the grid, be a part of nature?
Mae helps her Dad run the family buinsess, and again, there is much talk of birds. Of course Mae has fallen for a man. He is only given a one word name, Smith, and happens along like a recalcitrant peice of meat, stuck in a back molar.
I like how Smith becomes a diversion for Mae, and she gets tied to the swamp life, it’s not Deliverance here, just a nice kind of life watching birds, and of course playing golf. Tragedy lurks on the perimeter of this bucolic existence, Smith is a squatter living in a foreclosed home just up the road. I sense reality is his coat of arms, and he just doesn’t quite fit into life.
Mae narrates this place, like the Waltons without a baker’s dozen crumbsnatchers to navigate. Dad has bought the local school, for a cool $1k, and rents it out. The town sounds like, if it were at a low enough elevation, could be flooded to make way for a resevoir.
There is a snap to focus right at the end, which I found chilling, and heavy handed, but needed. It’s strange to say out loud, to both Mae and the book I was holding, “Of course they think that, it doesn’t sound like Mae is worried though.” This is a beefy story. Again, Ms Bergman shows a high skill level on the details. She never misses a moment to show and tell what it’s like to be a daughter. Can Dad be helped? Is Mae compelled to get help for him at the end?
Of course. It is impossible to stop life, once you let it in.
