For your enjoyment: “Church Cancels Cow” by Amy Hempel
This little piece originally appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, then in her collection Tumble Home, or, seven short-short, or just plain short stories and an 86 page novella. Very good stuff. There’s an image of an owl’s face, I won’t ruin it for you, but I’d been attributing it to Li-Young Lee, someone who I was also reading a lot of at the time. I just remember walking around the hotel I worked at thinking about how perfect the description, how apt. I also like that she (Hempel) doesn’t connect the dots for the reader, she just presents them in a clear pattern and says, essentially, “Have at it!” More after the story.
Church Cancels Cow
by Amy Hempel
Pheasant feathers in a plastic jack-o’-lantern–this is the way people decorate graves in October across from my house. In winter they tie wreaths to the stones like evergreen pendants in December. The halved-apple faces of owls on a branch will spook you, walking at dusk as I do with my dog who finds the one real pumpkin, small on a stem, and carries it off and flings it and retrieves, leaving on the pumpkin the marks of her teeth, the only desecration in these rows of tended plots.
Or not, according to the woman at the wheel of the red Honda Civic that appears from behind the Japanese maple and proceeds past the hedge of arborvitae where she slows and then rolls down her window to say, “You should keep that dog on a leash.” She says, “That dog left faces on my mother’s grave.”
When I realize she means feces, I say my dog didn’t do it. She says yes, my dog did it. I say, “Did you see this dog leave feces on the grave?” She says, “I found faces on my mother’s grave. I had to clean them off.” I say there are other dogs that walk here. I say my dog goes in the woods before the place where the headstones start.
I leave her talking to me from her car. I walk away with my dog in the direction of my house, and she follows in her car so I turn back around and lead her through the cemetery and sit down on a random grave and take a wire brush from the pocket of my coat and begin to groom my dog, brushing slowly from the ends up to the skin so as not to tug and hurt her. I stay where I am until the woman drives away, and I stay until she reappears. When she leaves the second time, she leaves rubber in the road.
For days I see her car across the street, parked on the little-used access road, her at the wheel just watching my house where my dog patrols the yard, unmistakeable dog. I write down her license plate number, so what. I pull weeds with my back to her. And after thoughts of worse things than bricks coming flying through the windows of my house, I pull off grass-stained gloves and cross to her car and say, “You know, I’m on your side about this. I have relatives buried here, and I don’t want to find faces on their graves.”
She says, “You have relatives buried here?”
For peace of mind I will lie about any thing at any time.
In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way, me counting cows on one side of the road, my brother counting cows on the other. But if we passed a church, the person on whose side the church appeared had to start their count over again.
Why did church cancel cow? The question was not a question back then, and when I try to think why, the best I can guess is–because we were having fun? Until I mention it to my brother who says, “Don’t you remember? You don’t remember. It was cemetery, not church, that cancels cow.”
And why it comes to me now.
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Right? Take it in for a second.
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OK, I just wanted to talk a little about the layering and parallels in this piece. There’s the obvious parallels: Cemetery from the cow game and from the Japanese lady’s face-stained grave; the counting of dogs and the counting of cows, both from a car. What really got me was the profundity of the game these kids were playing, and whether or not they were told the cemetery cancels cow rule or they made it up themselves, they clearly understood the concept of death at a young age. And though the narrator clearly thinks the Japanese lady’s absurd, her behavior in such a close proximity to death is humanized by the remembrance of mortality’s early place in even the lighter times.
Also, come on, faces/feces is pretty funny, or, that the narrator calls them faces when she confronts the stalker in her car. I love that. I always think of the Big Lebowski, how the Dude took phrases or unique words he’d heard earlier in the movie and says them. Or more recently in Hot Fuzz when Danny repeats Angel’s vocabulary guideline corrections immediately, and often incorrectly (”What made you want to be a policeman officer?”). The narrator here, was being more wiseass about it, which is funny also. Then the repetition of faces with that amazing “halved-apple faces of owls” which is so accurate. See:
Then of course there are other little things, like: “When she leaves the second time she leaves rubber in the road” which is a pretty crafty way to make “she peeled out” artistic. Small details like that are things that you need to pay close attention to in your own writing. Saying things in an easily understandable, but unique way. Something that the reader hasn’t read fifty times. The formatting is also a little off from ’standard’ with the dialog (normally each . This choice helps the reader breeze through the dialog a little more smoothly, I think. Though if it would slow the reader down, who knows, unless someone’s really curious, I guess they could reformat it themselves and report back.
This is a little too long to submit to the Indiana Review 1/2k prize, as it’s 591 words, but it’s close. A lot can be done in 500 words, as the notoriously brief Amy Hempel proves yet again here. My favorite, and many people’s favorite Hempel story is “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” which is in Reasons to Live as well as her collected stories… but I also found this little article about the story and a little research about the, apparently semi-autobiographical story. Very interesting, posted at the Hipster Book Club.