The Belle of Sleepy Hollow and Other Untold Stories in Classic American Tales

By Susan Lohafer

The Belle of Sleepy Hollow contains nine tales, each tied to a classic American short story. The new stories are implicit critiques and interpretations of the old ones, but they are also tributes to some of the most beloved works in American literature. Ref

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aubade Publishing
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781951547271

Susan Lohafer

Susan Lohafer grew up in New Jersey. She is a graduate of Harvard (B.A.), Stanford (M.A.), and New York University (Ph.D.). During her teaching career at the University of Iowa, she specialized in short fiction theory. This love of the short story form and classic American tales inspired her to write THE BELLE OF SLEEPY HOLLOW. Her interests in creative writing and nineteenth-century history came together in her debut novel, THE RELUCTANT PATRIOT-a fictional retelling of a true story about the American Civil War in Tennessee. Her academic books include COMING TO TERMS WITH THE SHORT STORY and READING FOR STORYNESS: PRECLOSURE THEORY, EMPIRICAL POETICS, AND CULTURE IN THE SHORT STORY, as well as the co-edited volume SHORT STORY THEORY AT A CROSSROADS. Shorter works include a personal essay listed as a Notable Essay of 2011 in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2012, and short stories in venues like THE SOUTHERN REVIEW and THE ANTIOCH REVIEW. Susan currently lives with her husband in Tennessee.

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Praise for Susan Lohafer’s

The Belle of Sleepy Hollow

"As a ‘reentry’ into classical American short stories—from those by Washington Irving to Ernest Hemingway—Susan Lohafer’s The Belle of Sleepy Hollow picks up various strands implicit in the stories themselves and then teases these strands into alternate story worlds that are loyal to the originals themselves but also delightful prequels, sequels, and side-stories. Lohafer’s bright intelligence, her enviable skill, is daunting: each of her stories is written in the voice of its predecessor—quite the stylistic feat—and she brings to her tribute an inventive, scrupulous, and wholly delightful capacity for the perfect detail, and a remarkable depth of psychological insight as she allows us to see familiar characters anew. Canonical texts gain gravitas over time, but they can also lose their immediacy. If one reads Lohafer’s stories with considerable suspense to learn how she will adapt her own narrative to classic tales, one is also taken aback to observe how she manages to enliven them with a renewed care towards human suffering, the intricacy of our yearning, and the mystery of experience that animated the original writers. A wonderful companion to the American short story tradition, this collection also has an artistic integrity that will reward readers for some time to come."

—Michael Trussler, University of Regina,

author of Encounters and The Sunday Book

"Powerful short stories transport and transform us. We take them into us and carry them forward. I am thrilled to have these nine in The Belle of Sleepy Hollow as my companions. While they share many of the touchstone traits of their predecessors, they also possess a unique power all their own. ‘The Purloined Tale,’ for example, a masterful homage to the father of detective fiction, will very likely gain its own classic status alongside not one but two revered Poe stories. Lohafer’s entanglement of the two stories into a third is a stroke of genius. The result is a rare enrichment of the reading experience of all three.

Attentive readers will be rewarded at every twist and turn in this storybook, where Lohafer has conjured a literary miracle. She brings a lifetime of reading, thinking, studying, teaching, and writing about short stories to bear on these creations, but the scholarship is seamlessly concealed. Readers new to short stories and readers well versed in them will find here a wellspring of reflection and enjoyment.

—Morris A. Grubbs, editor of

Home and Beyond: An Anthology of Kentucky Short Stories

and Conversations with Wendell Berry

Susan Lohafer has a deep understanding of the hidden elements that make a short story. Such is her subtle command of—and respect for—language that I had the image of all of language standing to attention, ready to serve her. She draws us inside beloved classic tales and, eloquently, seamlessly, reveals the untold stories of lesser-known characters or the after-stories of central characters. I was transfixed by these stories, by the view I was given into these characters’ lives, and the full knowledge that these lives would go on after I’d left them. This is the real mark and genius of a short story writer.

—Mary Costello, Irish short story writer and novelist,

author of The China Factory, Academy Street, and The River Capture

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Copyright © 2024 Susan Lohafer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Aubade Publishing.

Each of the nine sections of this short book is a narrative tied to a classic American short story in the public domain. Referencing the same characters, settings, and events, the author has situated each new tale within a time gap left by the original, or placed it before or after the known story, or told it from a different point of view. Each new story is an imaginative work in its own right, and any similarity to the preceding texts is either accidental or recontextualized.

Edited by Joe Puckett

Cover design and book layout by Cosette Puckett

Paintings by Susan Lohafer

Drawings by Cosette Puckett

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023944340

ISBN: 978-1-951547-27-1

Published by Aubade Publishing, Ashburn, VA

Printed in the United States of America

FOR

MICHAEL,

FIRST AND ALWAYS,

&

FOR

ALL WHO LOVE

THE SHORT STORY FORM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What Kind of Book Is This?

Author’s Preface

The Belle of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820)

Goodman Brown’s Curse

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown (1835; 1846)

A Purloined Tale

Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter (1845)

Bartleby, the Early Years

Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856)

Sylvy and the White Heron

Sarah Orne Jewett, A White Heron (1886)

Désirée’s Family

Kate Chopin, Désirée’s Baby (1894)

Grandison’s Wife

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Passing of Grandison (1899)

Revisiting the Jolly Corner

Henry James, The Jolly Corner (1909)

Hills Like Gray Elephants

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants (1927)

Acknowledgments

With Thanks

About the Author

WHAT KIND OF BOOK IS THIS?

ASTORY-WORLD IS an imaginative space in which authors live while composing, and where characters live forever. We enter it through the opening sentence, and if the story works, we dwell there until the last word. As a scholar and teacher, I spent many years trying to describe, track, and interpret what it means to move through a tale from entry to exit. As a reader and writer, I have been a life-long aficionado of that experience. Certain story-worlds continue to draw us into them over the centuries. Values and tastes change, and yet we return to these tales. They are the classics of the genre, and . . . but wait. Whose values? we ask. Whose tastes? Whose classics?

These questions are at the heart of much literary discussion today. In the effort to redress old biases, we generate new ones. I am for expanding, not contracting, the range of our appreciations. To add a Navajo legend, it is not necessary to subtract a Greek myth. To love Baldwin, we needn’t unlove Hawthorne. A classic tale is not an ideological battleground. It is a story-world that has been entered and reentered with profit and delight for many generations.

It is in that spirit of inclusion and renewal that this book came about. I began reentering some of my favorite story-worlds, exploring them like a time traveler. They dated mostly from the nineteenth century, though their authors were as different as Poe and Chesnutt or Jewett. In some cases, there was a minor character whose perspective seemed worth considering today. In other cases, there were time gaps in the original that teased the storyteller in me. There were instances where a prequel or a sequel might throw new light on a given narrative. And so, I began writing in response to these beloved texts.

My stories took place in the same story-worlds, but they were not modernizations, nor were they parodies, though my ear was attuned to the sound of the old voices. You might say I was reinvesting cultural capital, as Geraldine Brooks did in her 2005 novel March, which tells the story of the father who is absent from Little Women. If I had to describe my aim, I would say that, in revisiting these iconic stories, I was trying to open up themes and deploy lines of sight that broaden the text’s relevance or engage us in new ways in the twenty-first century. For example, it was to be expected that, in many of the tales, the female characters who had been glossed over in the original would now emerge with greater agency. Nor could I return to these stories without the benefit of hindsight, catching hints of the larger issues in the times and lives of the original authors.

Readers familiar with the works that inspired mine will, I hope, be interested in the relationship between the old and new texts, but it is not necessary to know the source material. I’ve included summaries of the older stories, but the narratives in this collection can, and must, be self-sufficient. In the end, of course, the original tales were simply catalysts. Whatever else the new stories may be, they are products of my imagination.

Susan Lohafer

Johnson City, Tennessee

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW

1820

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Washington Irving (1783-1859), a versatile man of letters often considered the first professional writer in American literary history, was one of the three fathers of the American short story, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. He was well known and appreciated in England and Europe, and influenced by early Romantic writers abroad. His most famous story, Rip Van Winkle, was based on a German folktale, but in that tale, as in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, he famously adapted the borrowed elements to the scenery and culture of his New York state environs. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set in a small Dutch village on the Hudson River in the late 1700s. An outsider, the superstitious Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane woos Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of a wealthy farmer. After the annual harvest party, his rival, Brom Bones, impersonates the local bogeyman and scares Crane out of town. According to the village wives, Crane has been abducted by the Headless Horseman, but a few years later, he is spotted in another part of the state, apparently doing quite well for himself. Meanwhile, Katrina has married Brom Bones. Here is her untold story.

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[A] pile of loose bones that fell into a lounging figure, elbow resting on steepled knee. (page 7)

THE BELLE OF SLEEPY HOLLOW

KATRINA, EYES BENT on the square of fine linen she was hemming, listened with sudden interest to the men sitting at the other end of the piazza. Her husband, Brom, had raised his feet to the railing, ankles crossed. He and Henrik Gruber were smoking their evening pipes in the fading warmth of the autumn day. An apron of dried grass spread down to the lane, and in the distance you might have glimpsed the Hudson River and a field of ripened wheat.

I did not see him myself, their guest was explaining between puffs. He owned the adjacent farm and had just returned from the City, where he had business in the grain trade. Waving the stem of his pipe, he made tick-marks on the air. But I heard it from the corn factor, who had been talking to old Van der Donck at the Exchange, whose cousin used to live in Sleepy Hollow, and would have known the man on sight. He swore it was Ichabod.

At any mention of the former schoolmaster, Brom always grinned. Ignoring his broad wink, Katrina spread her handiwork on her knee. Before her marriage, she had often plied her needle in the open air, but she had had no need to eavesdrop in those days. Visitors had formed a circle around her chair. They had vied for her attention, competing for a glance.

She’d had a farm to bestow then, and cherry lips and corn-silk hair and sky-blue eyes. But all she’d had in gift had passed to Brom. What he wanted from her now he no longer had to win. Yet, lately, he’d been watching her more closely. She was precious to him now, a planted field under snow. When spring came again, she’d be swollen to twice her size, nestled among the wives at the May dance. All the village lads who had followed her with hungry looks would turn away courteously. In recent weeks, her thoughts had wandered into dark corners as she pictured herself in matronly disguise. Perhaps that is why Ichabod’s name had unsettled her. Even his fawning eyes would not know her soon.

Katrina glanced over at the oak near the old Van Tassel homestead. Beneath that tree’s canopy she had taught her dolls to sit up straight. On the grass, she had bowled at pins with girls who played to lose. And there, when she was eighteen, she had taken lessons in psalmody from the very man they were discussing.

If you had known Ichabod Crane, you would remember him. He’d been a foreigner in this old Dutch settlement. A Connecticut émigré. To the delight of her listeners, Katrina had called him a fork among spoons. In many little ways, though, he had made himself agreeable, boarding around the village in the homes of his young pupils. Then one day, with his future in mind, he’d announced his intention to give singing lessons to the ladies, a social grace that God approved.

As he had, of course, cannily suspected, his only students were the wives and daughters of men like Baltus Van Tassel, for no one else could afford or desire such refinements in their women. But what did the other girls care for music! One day, when Ichabod was within hearing, she’d scoffed at the idea. They’d much rather have a pony cart or a beaver cape! His eyes had narrowed with interest. Afterwards, she’d found herself planning phrases in advance, carrying sentences around until his ear was available.

She could still see him cresting the little rise near the old manor house. First, his flattened knob of a head would bob on the horizon, his nose cleaving the air. Next, his bony shoulders would appear, shirt billowing from the yardarm. Then his flying elbows and pumping knees would churn down the slope toward her, like a windmill under sail.

She had only to close her eyes to relive that final lesson. It had been autumn then, too, the season of reaping and binding. As usual, she had been sitting on a mossy pillow of earth beneath a wide-spreading oak tree. A tiny stream bubbled near her feet. Tired from the day’s labor, her parents dozed on the porch of the Van Tassel home nearby. In preparation for the harvest celebration, the entire farm had become a kitchen. Cream was thickening in the springhouse. Piglets melted into meat pies and apples sizzled on the hearth. The air was dusty with sieved flour for the lacy fritters she made herself.

Having slipped away earlier to wash her hands and change her dress, she had positioned herself demurely, taking care to show an ankle as dainty as a chicken bone. Above her, the tree rustled its leaves obligingly, while the stream did its best to murmur. She bent her head gracefully over a Watts hymnal bound in pigskin.

Ahoy! called Ichabod. When he reached her, he dropped to the ground in a pile of loose bones that fell into a lounging figure, elbow resting on steepled knee. With a start, she said, Oh, it’s you! Forgetting the telltale hymnal, she added distractedly, We’ve been so busy, I forgot it was your day.

In her charade there was a flicker of disquiet. Something about harvesttime emboldened the young men of Sleepy Hollow. For as long as she could remember, the annual party was followed by announcements of betrothals. She herself had four or five rural suitors who might rise to the occasion this year, their shyness overcome by her juicy prospects and tasty figure, not to mention a keg of Van Tassel beer.

First among them, of course, was Abraham van Brunt, a scamp in a gladiator’s body, known locally as Brom Bones. He had tapped her on the shoulder, saying You and me, lass, to which she had replied, "You and I what?" thus silencing him for months. The thought that he might find his tongue this year sent a flash of heat through her veins, but then she sighed discontentedly. He led a crew of merry pranksters, but he was easily forgiven. Brom was destined to be a country squire, rather like Katrina’s father. Living with him would be as interesting as eating beef three times a day. And as for music! He had a fine bass voice, but would as soon sing with her as don a petticoat.

Psalm 65, part 2, said Ichabod. Just the thing for today. He pulled his left hand from one of his myriad pockets and waved aloft his copy of Watts, bound in torn paper. Right elbow still moored to his knee, he flipped pages in a blur. Aha! Here ’tis. And suddenly his rich baritone filled the air, causing the tiny bones in her ear to vibrate. As was their practice, he sang a line and then paused for her to echo it in her light treble.

Quickly enough, she saw the reason for his choice. It was a hymn in praise of the season. ‘Those wand’ring cisterns in the sky / Borne by the winds around / With wat’ry treasures well supply / The furrows of the ground.’

‘. . . g-round,’ she finished.

" ‘Growwwwnd,’ he admonished, and then laughed. Cisterns wandering in the sky!"

Dangerous for the birds. She would have welcomed the