If the author of these stories seems to say “trust me,” it is for other and perhaps better reasons than craftsmanship, than skill in guiding the reader through the delights and hazards of life by the techniques of fiction. Fundamentally, it is the heart and mind of this writer that are to be trusted. She is more than one of art’s faithful disciples: she is one of life’s true lovers. Her vision is compassionate, humorous, intelligent, full of a loving detachment, full of poised awareness of and sympathy for her characters. She has a profound respect for their reality as persons. They are not manipulated by opinion, they are not roundly judged. They are often celebrated, but rarely condemned, except, as in “Petrified Man,” out of the most implicitly humane of moral visions. Starting from the lyrical impulse, taking as her materials her own place and people, and presenting them in her own highly individual style, she explores what is universal in humanity for our relish, our wonder, and our contemplation.

The Wide Net

William Wallace Jamieson’s wife Hazel was going to have a baby. But this was October, and it was six months away, and she acted exactly as though it would be tomorrow. When he came in the room she would not speak to him, but would look as straight at nothing as she could, with her eyes glowing. If he only touched her she stuck out her tongue or ran around the table. So one night he went out with two of the boys down the road and stayed out all night. But that was the worst thing yet, because when he came home in the early morning Hazel had vanished. He went through the house not believing his eyes, balancing with both hands out, his yellow cowlick rising on end, and then he turned the kitchen inside out looking for her, but it did no good. Then when he got back to the front room he saw she had left him a little letter, in an envelope. That was doing something behind someone’s back. He took out the letter, pushed it open, held it out at a distance from his eyes. . . . After one look he was scared to read the exact words, and he crushed the whole thing in his hand instantly, but what it had said was that she would not put up with him after that and was going to the river to drown herself.

“Drown herself. . . . But she’s in mortal fear of the water!”

He ran out front, his face red like the red of the picked cotton field he ran over, and down in the road he gave a loud shout for Virgil Thomas, who was just going in his own house, to come out again. He could just see the edge of Virgil, he had almost got in, he had one foot inside the door.

They met half-way between the farms, under the shade-tree.