Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave": a half-dead and physically shattered, monstrous veteran, released from the hospital and returned to his family's mansion in Virginia, seeks hired men, "applicants," boys really, to act as his intermediaries -- his prostheses to the living world.
Characters in "In a Shallow Grave" variously divided, contradictory: simultaneously healthy/sick, beautiful/defiled, male/female, young/old, ignorant/refined.
The veteran, Garnet Melrose, is basically inside-out. His doctor tells him: "Well, Garnet, you look like an open anatomy chart, one can see all your veins and arteries moving with the blood." As a kind of living corpse, the healthiest part of him is his bones; again the doctor speaks:
"although your skin bears a total disfigurement, you ought to bear in mind, despite your outward appearance you have a wonderful fine and strong bone structure, and it is the bones that are the real measure of a man's bearing and good looks."
The doctor advises: "it is your memory which keeps you in pain, learn to forget and you will be well again."
At first, Garnet has difficulty finding "applicants" to be his servant: "all the young men acted the same way, that is they took one look, and their gorge started to rise, and they would strain and cough, wanting to vomit."
The primary duty of the applicants is to take messages to Garnet's childhood sweetheart, the "Widow Rance" who is herself an odd mixture of death and life -- only 28, she has lost two husbands (brothers) to the same war in which Garnet was disfigured. She also lost to early death the infants she bore to each.
"The Widow Rance is twenty-eight but sometimes acts like some old rich woman of sixty." It also becomes clear that while she has forbidden Garnet to approach her, that he spies on her at night.
Garnet's questions for each of the applicants: "Can you prepare simple food? Like say heat already prepared soup, boil coffee, rub my feet when my attack comes on and the flesh above my heart, and can you take letters to the Widow Rance?"
Few white boys are willing to perform such service -- particularly, it seems, the foot rubbing: "the human foot is the real nigger of the human body" -- and it is clear that the black boys he hires are not satisfactory in the primary duty of communicating with the Widow Rance -- for the applicants are clearly physical proxies for the once handsome Garnet who, despite his doctor's advice, refuses to forget his past, his youth (he went to war when he was 17).
Garnet, who was a devoted dancer before going into the war, relives his youth by sneaking into an abandoned dancehall at night and recreating in his mind the time when he was sought after by all the young women of the town.
Garnet's divisions suggested by his name: "people stumble on hearing my name, the first name doesn't fit with the second, the first name, they feel, sounds like a girl's, and the second to them sounds too historical." His nicknames in the Army are indicative of his mood swings: Garnet Melrose = "Granite" and "Morose." The girlish side of his nature embodied in his still flowing hair: "I remember my first-grade teacher had said, "You have hair a girl would die for," and whilst everything else turned the color of mulberries, my hair was untouched by when I was blown up in the war, and so it made me look even more outlandish."
One of the black applicants, Quintus, becomes Garnet's reader. Reading to Garnet seemingly at random -- but maybe not so randomly -- from the old, dusty volumes, he appears to combine learning and ignorance. He fails as the physical applicant Garnet desires; becoming instead a kind of intellectual prosthesis.
Then the ideal physical applicant arrives: Daventry. He is a mixture of beauty and defilement: handsome but with his front teeth missing. And a mixture of innocence and brutality: he suffers from guilt at having, in self-defence, murdered two Mexican men. His beauty being on the outside, he is the perfect emissary for the inside-out Garnet.
Garnet says of his arrival: "I do not believe he was from this world. I believe he was sent by the Maker of All Things perhaps if such exists. I do not say that he brougt me total joy, but he was the ideal applicant."
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