Just the way it is: "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau, Best American Short Stories 2021

I commented earlier in BASS this year, when discussing Vanessa Cuti's "Our Children," about how some stories intentionally leave out more than the barest hints about character motivation. "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau does it a little bit differently: we get some hints about what motivates her central character Haguillory, but at the end, we're still kind of grasping for a fuller explanation. Possibly, the ultimate motivation eludes us because at some point, it's impossible to answer what makes people be kind, or cruel, or empathetic, or selfish, or whatever. It's a mystery, and if we knew the answer to that question, we'd have a lot more kind people in the world. 

Synopsis

Haguillory and his wife Dot have settled into the routine of older couples who don't like each other that much. They avoid each other, with Dot staying up late to fret over the news about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then going to bed in a different room from Haguillory, where she sleeps until late. Haguillory is a mean old cuss, the kind who looms large in the mythologies of neighborhoods across America, one who poisons the neighbors' trees and dogs. 

The story is contained in one day when Haguillory rises to go crabbing and Dot decides to go with him. This is the first action in the story that doesn't have a deeply explained motivation. She simply says she wants "to see how things are down there." That might make sense if what she meant was that she wanted to see how bad the damage from the hurricanes had been at the Sabine marshes where they go to catch crabs. But it seems like she's already been there since the hurricanes. The hurricanes, we learn later, were almost a year ago, and Dot was last in the marshes "months ago," so she's seen them since the hurricanes. That's why Haguillory is confused, and suggests they'll look "about the same as last time." 

But she goes, whatever the reason. Haguillory fusses about this and that as they drive an hour or so to the spot where they go crabbing. We get local flavor and see that the area still isn't close to getting back to normal. There are FEMA trailers and trash from the destruction strewn about. Lots of people, including Haguillory, still haven't been paid by their insurance companies for the damage, leading to a humorous local distaste for claims adjusters. 

Eventually, a family pulls up behind where Haguillory and Dot are crabbing. They're looking for a cat the father abandoned in this area a week ago. He was tired of the cat pissing on one of his kid's beds, which is especially obnoxious because the family has been cooped up together in a FEMA trailer for almost a year. The father originally lied and said the cat went missing, and now the mother is angry at him and frantically looking for it. Dot sympathizes with the mother, but Haguillory can't see why anyone would fuss so much over a cat. The family leaves as a storm is approaching. As Haguillory is packing up, he sees the cat. He throws the cat into the canal, possibly thinking he is being merciful, although it isn't clear to whom he is showing mercy.

The names

There are a number of clues about underlying meaning in the story. The first is in the names of the two main characters. The title character's name is apparently one still in use in Cajun country. It means "active" or "dynamic" or something like that. "Dot," on the other hand, is sort of the opposite. Not the real meaning of the name "Dottie," but the connotations of "dot," which would suggest a static point somewhere. Haguillory is restless and roving, but Dot is fixed. This might explain why Dot is more capable of empathy, more welcoming of others. She feels more secure in her place, while Haguillory feels like he always needs to defend his territory, to the death, if need be (at least the death of trees and dogs). 

What's eating Haguillory

There are a lot of things that set Haguillory off--Dot not being fast with a crab net, maggots costing too much, his son adopting a child of color--but what seems to particularly irritate him are the editorial choices of the news. He complains at one point about the news always showing the same thing: "New Orleans this, Katrina that, like those people were the only ones who'd been hit by a storm." More pointedly, he thinks of "those looters in flooded New Orleans...who seemed to think their suffering entitled them to inflict suffering on others." 

What's got Haguillory's goat is that he feels the news' tendency to focus on one set of people affected by the hurricanes leaves others out. When he sees the family looking for their cat and hears about them having been in a trailer for a year, he thinks, "They'd never show that on the news. It was sad, how they forgot about some people, not about others." 

It's not hard to decode what he means

It's very easy for those of us reading this story post Black Lives Matter to know what Haguillory really means when he's complaining about what he sees on the news. "Those people in New Orleans" means "black people." Haguillory is incensed that the news is focusing so much on their suffering when there are plenty of white people suffering, too. It's the "all lives matter" argument all over again, but put into a event from a decade earlier. Haguillory thinks the news is focused too much on the suffering of black people to the exclusion of white people. 

Why does Haguillory feel this way?

This is the really difficult "why" question to answer in this story. Although Haguillory is a miserable old buzzard, he's not without empathy. He truly feels sorry for the family he sees. He gives one of the children a multitool he won at a painters' union gumbo dinner. (Karen Carlson said in her look at this story that we don't know what he did for a living. Was he a painter? Or is the "painters' union" something I don't understand?)  After giving the gift, he seems to reveal his motivation for having given it: "I feel sorry for y'all." That's a pretty clear example of empathy. 

I think the reason Haguillory feels so incensed about the attention black people are getting on the news is that he sees his own piece of the pie shrinking thereby. If the world is going to tend to their suffering, there won't be enough left for them to tend to his. We don't know why Haguillory has killed his neighbors' tree or dog, but we can assume it's for some kind of encroachment onto his property. Nothing makes him madder than someone invading what he views as his space, taking what he views as his. 

In the parlance of our times, he is objecting to the loss of white privilege, to the end of the long-standing foregrounding of white stories and white grievances over black. 

This is conjecture, of course. The only hint we get about why he killed the tree is that he gathers the pecans it dropped onto his yard and threw them away. But it seems a likely explanation. Or, maybe, he's mean just because he's mean. He did string Dot along when he met her by telling her a fake name "just for the hell of it." He's a "tete dure," a hard head. Maybe he's not threatened at all, but just hates what he hates because he hates it. It would be the same answer Bruce Hornsby and the Range cited hearing decades ago for why there is prejudice in the world: That's just the way it is. (Note that the song itself does not believe in this line, just as the speaker in Robert Frost's "Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall" doesn't actually believe that "good fences make good neighbors.")

The fish and the cat

In addition to the dog, Haguillory is twice cruel to animals. He mutilates a garfish he has caught and then throws it back in the water, and when he finds the family cat, he chucks it in the water, too. Dot gets mad at him for crushing the fish, but Haguillory is genuinely confused by her anger. "Was it his fault the gar was an ugly fish?" he wonders. It's similar to his logic when he suggests, earlier in the story, that his adopted grandchild of color should go back where she came from if she doesn't like it here. He wonders, "Did she think he had fun saying that kind of truth?"

So Haguillory sees himself as a bringer of hard truths. Gars are ugly. They should be killed, because they're ugly. The cat is a burden and should be killed. This is why, to his mind, killing the cat is a "kind of mercy," the final line of the story. Haguillory actually sees himself as a keeper of some kind of order or good in the world. So perhaps his dislike for news about black people is another thing he files in his mind under this self-image. He's not a miserable old buzzard, he's just telling an unpopular truth. Sounds a lot like the apologia for Trump I often heard. 

One tantalizing detail in the story is the way Haguillory equates the cat to Dot. Early on, he thinks that when it gets hot, she'll be "spitting mean--mean as a cat with its tail on fire." What does this mean, then, when he can't understand all the fuss over a cat, and why he thinks it's "merciful" to drown the cat? Merciful for whom? The family or the cat? Or both? What kind of mercy does he intend to show Dot?

Guest editor Jesmyn Ward wrote in her introduction to BASS that Haguillory "changes, just a hairbreadth," after his chance encounter with the family and their cat, but I'm not sure he has. If anything, he might have slipped even further into his beliefs. His belief in his "mercy" has some uncomfortable similarities to what a Republican Congressman said in 2005 after thousands of homes of poor people in New Orleans were destroyed: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Haguillory believes he's ultimately showing mercy to those he thinks of as unworthy by putting them out of their misery.