“The Yearling” by Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings,(400 pages, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth), is the only
Pulitzer Prize winning novel found in the children’s
section of your local library or bookstore. Unlike the novels
about dysfunction and human tragedy, both epic and intimate, of
which there are many, this winner wrote a story about a golden
time, after the Civil War and before electricity and automobiles,
and a young boy, whose idyllic childhood arched through this
time, on an island of long leaf pines in the center of “the
rolling sea that was the scrub” in a sort of endless
halcyon mist. The language that Rawlings uses to describe the
inner and natural world of the protagonist, Jody Baxter, is
euphoric. Here’s an example: “There were other such
islands to the north and west, where some accident of soil or
moisture produced patches of luxuriant growth; even of hammock,
the richest growth of all. Live oaks were here and there; the red
bay and the magnolia; wild cherry and sweet gum; hickory and
holly.”
Jody’s father is a small and energetic, compulsively
honest, son of a preacher named Penny Baxter. Penny was a
nickname given to him because of his size, by one of the meaner,
dark haired Forrester boys, Lem Forrester. The Forresters live
down the street, and have five sons, most of whom are older than
Jody, who is twelve going on thirteen. One of the boys, nicknamed
“Fodderwing,” is Jody’s age. Fodderwing got his
nickname by putting a sod like material on his arms and jumping
off a barn, thinking he would be able to fly. Instead it left him
crippled even further. He was born with a genetic deformity and
is not normal. Fodderwing’s parents let him keep all sorts
of strange pets: a raccoon, black swamp rabbits, and a fox
squirrel. The grown ups consider him “witless” but
Jody appreciates his friend’s gentle nature and special way
with wild animals.
Jody’s mother is Ory Baxter, a large woman usually referred
to as “Ma” who towers over her husband physically.
She won’t allow Jody to have pets like Fodderwing does. She
has a stern, serious nature caused by the heartache of losing
several children as babies or toddlers, before Jody was born. It
is almost as if she is afraid to love him too much, in case he
will be taken from her. Even though she is more emotional than
the men in the story, she is still more stoic than either gender
in today’s world of “touchy-feely”
psychological templates.
The first hint of trouble in paradise comes as Lem Forrester
takes a shining to golden-haired Twink Weatherby. The problem
with that is that Oliver, the son of Grandma Hutto, Jody’s
surrogate grandmother, already believes that Twink is his girl.
The Forrester brothers gang up on Oliver in a fistfight over
Twink, three-to-one, and Penny is called to step in and save
Oliver’s life. Penny and his young son Jody step in on
account of Oliver being unfairly matched. This causes bad blood
between the neighbors, even though Penny tries to explain that it
was on principle that he was forced to step in, and not because
of a personal dislike toward the Forresters. The Forresters feel
that they are the wronged party, which justifies them baiting the
Baxters hogs into traps with plans of changing the brand to their
own.
Penny goes out tracking the hogs, followed by Jody, and says,
referring to the inevitable confrontation over the stolen
property, “When there’s trouble waitin for you, you
jest as good to go meet it,” which is followed in rapid
succession by the irony of being bitten by a rattlesnake. In a
split second, it is up to Jody to save his father, if it is
possible. He tells Jody to run to the Forresters, who are the
next closest human settlement, and get help. A few short moments
later, a doe bounds, and his father shoots, kills, and slices the
deer open, pulling the liver as a life saving antidote to the
snake venom. By placing the organ on a self-inflicted cut over
the bite area, Penny’s father is able to draw some of the
venom out, into the liver. The doe’s fawn walks out of the
brush and cries by his dead mother.
Jody runs to the Forresters,
and cries that his father is dying of snake bite, and begs them
to get the Doctor. Lem is the only one of the Forrester brothers
who is mean enough that he doesn’t care. The other
brothers, Buck and Mill-wheel, after hearing that Penny used the
deer liver, decide that since he has a chance of survival, and
since snakebite is a tortuous death, that they were obliged to
help even an enemy. Buck rides to pick up Penny, and Mill-wheel
rides to get Doc Wilson, who is, like the Forresters, a heavy
drinker, drunk more often than not. Jody can only walk home and
wait at his father’s bedside. On the trip home, he
discovers the reason the doe had leapt out in front of them-to
lead them away from her fawn, who was hiding completely still in
the long grass.
After a long vigil, Penny Baxter survives the snakebite. In an
exulted moment of act of gratitude for the doe’s sacrifice,
Jody’s wish is granted: to find the fawn and bring it home
and raise it. Ma Baxter, who was set against allowing any pets
considering the scarcity of food, is so gra?eful that Penny is
alive that she doesn’t protest Penny’s gift to Jody.
What follows is a love story between boy and fawn, and a coming
of age story. The next year, Jody raises the fawn, and grows
himself from boy to young boy on the cusp of manhood. The fawn,
also male, grows into a yearling, a very young buck, during the
same time Jody goes from hating girls to hating to see the girl
he “hates” playing hopscotch with another boy.
The
conflict over Twink Weatherby escalates. The rampage of carnage
inflicted by a 300 plus pound bear named “Slewfoot”
because of a missing toe continues until Penny has had enough.
The fawn is a symbol for both the father and the son: For the son
it represents his tenderness, that boyhood still allows.
Penny’s father was stern and never let his son be a boy.
Penny wants to be a better father than his own, and so frequently
covers for Jody with his mother when he wants to run off and
play, avoiding chores. His idea is to let him be young. But the
fawn; who, without a mother, would have died in the wild if it
had not been for Penny’s tenderness, also represents
Penny’s mortality. The snakebite doesn’t kill Penny,
but he isn’t going to live forever. He wants to know that
his son will protect Ory.
Death is there, a hovering threat, an ultimate reality,
inevitable. Many of us as adults forget that as adolescents, we
faced death, daring us to begin our ascendance into adulthood,
assuring us of its ultimate victory. That is the underground
river of the melancholy of puberty; The nascent consciousness
that all that follows youth; our blossoming, will end. Jody
Baxter learns directly, and painfully, the hard lesson of the
wilderness.
“The Yearling,” which won the
Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1938, is a valuable teaching tool
for children and adults about social and cultural shifts in
American history, giving an account of the ecology and landscape
of a region, central Florida, before many of nature’s
predators indigenous to the area became endangered or extinct. It
also reminds us of the sacrifices of our forbearers, for whom
survival was never a given, and could even be interpreted, in a
postmodern context, as a critique of gender roles. For Jody,
becoming a man, means saying goodbye forever to the tender part
of himself that wanted to rescue a baby deer. Was losing
one’s tender heartedness necessary then, for our ancestors?
Is it now, for us? Reading this book will help you find your
answers to these two important questions.
© Moira Cue for the Hollywood Sentinel 2009 all rights
reserved.