The Stone Boy

The short story “The Stone Boy” by Gina Berriault was first published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1957, was included in Berriault's first collection of short stories, The Mistress, and Other Stories in 1965, and was adapted into a film in 1984. Relatively little is known about Berriault: she was born to Russian Jewish parents in Long Beach, California in 1927, and first came to the notice of critics in 1958. In 1963, she moved to Mexico City to take up a writer's fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritos. Berriault's last notable work was Women in their Beds, published 1996, which earned her the Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The Stone Boy tells the story of nine-year-old Arnold, who has lived his whole life in the shadow of his beautiful and accomplished older brother, Eugene, (known as “Eugie”). One morning, Arnold wakes up very early to pick peas with his brother. Unusually, he gets up and dressed before his brother, who seems to sleep through the alarm. This gives Arnold a strange feeling, as if it were an inversion of the usual dynamic between the two. Arnold finally wakes his brother and goes downstairs. He takes his gun off the rack and prepares for duck shooting. When Eugie comes down, he reminds Arnold that it's not duck season, but Arnold keeps his gun. The boys go to the garden to pick peas as planned, which must be done before dawn.

The brothers leave the house together. They come upon a wire fence near the lake that they need to squeeze through to get to the field. Eugie does so first, without incident. When Arnold attempts to do the same, he accidentally sets off his gun. He flinches, expecting that his brother will scold or make fun of him, as usual. However, Eugie says nothing. Arnold notices that Eugie has fallen to the ground, and is bleeding from the neck. He tries to awaken Eugie, to no avail and continues on to pick peas by himself. Later, after the sun has fully risen, he returns to the farmstead, to find that the rest of the family is awake and bustling. He informs them that Eugie is dead. The family, shocked, refuses to believe him at first. Then they travel to the lake and find his body.

Arnold's father and Uncle Andy – who had always had a soft spot for Eugie, who resembled him – take Arnold into town to meet with the Sheriff. The sheriff asks him several questions about his brother's death; he wonders whether the boys got along well. Arnold's father answers that they did. The sheriff asks Arnold why he didn't tell anyone about the shooting when it happened, and Arnold has no answer. In the face of Arnold's apparent lack of introspection, the sheriff decides that one of two things must be true: either Arnold has no feelings, or he's just stupid. However, the sheriff makes it clear that he belies the former – and Arnold soon realizes that his uncle Andy agrees.

Back home, the family has a quiet and tense dinner together, and then some of their neighbors come over. Arnold overhears them tell many stories about Eugie, who was universally loved. Eventually, Uncle Andy tells the men what the sheriff had said about Arnold, and as they discuss Arnold, he feels emptier and emptier. Finally, he goes to bed, hollowed out and numb, but not regretful.

In the middle of the night, Arnold awakes. He is upset, and his first impulse, understandably, is to go to his mother. He does so; he wants to tell her how scared he was when he realized Eugene was dead. He wants her to wrap her arms around him and make everything okay. However, to his shock, when he knocks on her door, his mother is not of a mind to comfort him. She turns him from her door, asking him, mockingly, “Is night when you get afraid?” Ashamed, and both literally and figuratively naked, Arnold returns to his room.

At breakfast the next day, tension fills the air. Arnold's sister pointedly ignores him, until their father intervenes. Arnold understands the gesture to mean he hasn't been completely ejected from the family, but all is far from well. He has internalized the version of himself projected onto him by the sheriff and his uncle. His mother asks him why he knocked on her door the previous night, but he can only answer that he “didn't want nothing.” He leaves the house to chase a lost calf and nothing is resolved.

The Stone Boy brought Berriault great critical acclaim because of its reserved, non-theatrical presentation of complex, difficult emotions and relationships. It did not, however, bring her much mainstream popularity, despite the film adaptation of her story decades later. Ultimately, what is most haunting about Berriault's story is its ambivalence: Eugene's death is not the crux of the story, but rather, Arnold's inexplicable reaction to it – a reaction that his home life seems partially, if not fully, to justify.