The Best Revenge: Short Stories

Although I have long enjoyed Rebecca Rule's newspaper column on New Hampshire writers, I had never read any of her fiction (having somehow missed "Wood Heat" in 1992 and the hardcover printing of this collection, 1995). My loss. Rule's incisive, earthy prose captures the spirit and daily grind of small-town rural life with affection and humor, devoid of sentimentality.Her characters are mostly natives who go back at least a couple of generations. They hunt, trap and fish, attend library committee and selectmen's meetings, bring up kids and fight with their spouses, usually about money. These are regular people. There are no drunkards, wife beaters or down-and-outs. When couples wrangle, you feel for both of them. Piercingly, you feel the anxiety of their children.Many of Rule's characters strike an instant chord of recognition. The sour-tempered, know-it-all naysayer, Mort Wallace, who's got nothing better to do but waste everyone else's time cranking away at every public meeting. In "Yankee Curse" Mort absorbs the unspoken but imaginative curses of his neighbor Miranda Coffey who knits her way through a School District Meeting: "May your neighbors steal from your wood pile, Mort Wallace." "May a rat die between the studs of your bedroom wall." Or the grouchy lakefront neighbor who guards her turf by making her newcomer neighbors miserable in "The Best Revenge." There's more than one in every town.Some stories are delightfully lighthearted. "Lindy Lowe at Bat," one of the few stories told in the third person, is a warmhearted tale of Little League baseball, the adult undercurrents on the sidelines, and a girl's determination. Dryly humorous, "The Widow and the Trapper," narrated by the flinty trapper, follows the surprising journey of a blossoming relationship, set against a background of trout, loons and human coexistence with nature.But the most gripping stories are those dealing with family tensions and troubles. And the most gripping of those are the ones narrated by children. The troubles of their parents loom large and scary. Within the framework of rescuing a small cat from a tall tree in "Three," Rule evokes a time of grief, calamity, and anxiety for the future, culminating in a moment when a child puts herself in danger because bad things come in three and the thought of "the third bad thing" happening to her mother is unbearable.Adults are often scary to the children who love and depend upon them. In "Walking the Trapline," the father is a man (like many of the men in these stories) who does what he wants and abides no backtalk from anyone. Though the narrator's younger brother is expected to learn about the trapline from age 9, less is expected of her. "He allowed me to come along when the weather was fine and the dishes done." The story, following a long, cold day on the trapline, focuses on the shifting family dynamics as the children band together for comfort and companionship, but defect into small betrayals in competition for the