Daniyal Mueenuddin Reads Peter Taylor

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're Pilgrims by P appeared in The New Yorker in September. Nineteen sixty three.

Then I heard Mr. Louder and my uncle open the back doors of the car. While the car was still moving, they leaped out onto the ground. They both were big men, more than six feet tall and with sizable stomachs that began just below the breastbone, but they sprinted. The story was chosen by Daniel Muina. Who is the author of the story collection in Other Rooms Other Wonders, a winner of the Commonwealth? and the novel This is Where the Serpent Lives, which came out earlier this year.

Hi Danielle. Hello, how are you? I'm good.

So you mentioned to me when we were discussing this podcast that your mother knew Peter Taylor and interviewed him for the Paris Review. Can you tell me a bit about that connection? Yeah. I'm not quite sure exactly how she came to know him first, but I know many years ago back in the sixties, she'd done the interview of Katherine Ann Porter. Um and so I think that's how she got plugged in with uh Paris Review folks.

And then I think she's met him somewhere around and about in New York. She'd moved back to New York and was living there and had met him and thought that this would be an interesting conversation. She admired his stories a great deal. And I think that there was something about the stories that reminded her of Pakistan m where she'd spent all her time and about which she was writing. She was also a writer and And was concerned with the some of the same themes I think that he has

Mm-hmm. And does that interest transfer to you, who you have also spent a lot of time on the farm in Pakistan? Yeah. No, it's it's all very familiar, isn't it? It's it's the the way in which he comes at his stories is familiar to anybody who's been in a place like Pakistan where s some of the same sorts of hierarchies and, you know, uh class issues and uh race issues even uh of of a certain kind, uh you know, we we're dealing with the same material to some extent. Yeah.

How did you first start reading Peter Taylor's work? Um I think I would have read it because she turned me on to it probably quite early. My mother used to sort of feed me things that she thought were would be useful to me or interesting to me. And uh so quite early on, probably when I was, you know, going off to college around in my early twenties.

She would give me armfuls of books and that was probably among them. I don't remember exactly which book she gave me, but I do remember at some point he glided into my horizons. Yeah, I remember being uh initially I think as I think a lot of readers will find, he seems a little sort of uh dry almost. It's a little bit very mannered. And then as

one gets further into it, you know, the the richness of and also the sort of the bloodiness of it becomes more and more evident. At first it might seem not very, you know, dr very very controlled, and I think that underneath the control it's so often with Fiction, there's you know a lot of much more violent and emotional movement than is initially uh evident. Aaron Powell And this story, Two Pilgrims.

uh is one of more than twenty stories that Peter Taylor published in The New Yorker between nineteen forty eight and nineteen eighty one. Why did you choose this one to read and talk about today? I know you had initially wanted one that was much longer, which we couldn't do, but what made this the second choice? Yeah, this story I think has a lot of the s I mean, I'm I've been as my book has just come out, so I've been dealing with themes of class and and of manners in that way that

uh I think that are is very well represented in this story. These two men who are sort of are very controlled in their and then they encounter this wild scene of this fire and uh and the ways in which they both do and don't confront the violence of the scene they come upon. This felt very familiar to me.

as somebody who's been r who writes about Pakistan and has just published a book with some of the same sort of conflicts in it between sort of the way these men present themselves and the ex the experience that's described in the story.

There's a tension between the two which I thought found really interesting. Mm-hmm. It is funny to hear Pakistan repeatedly, you know, compared to the American South because it's not a a natural parallel one makes. Yeah, that's right. But yet I think there is so mu I mean, I think part of as I said before, I think the stories of the American South have a lot of uh similarity or commonalities with the stories that come out of Pakistan, I think.

Particularly the ones that are having to do with, you know, farming in feudal structures. Because the South is sort of feudal in a quite different way externally, and then there's structural similarities which are quite striking and which make the work similar if you describe these places. Yeah.

Just to introduce the story a little, it was published in nineteen sixty three. Um I'm guessing the narrator of the story who's a seventeen year old It's probably um seventeen around the same time that Peter Taylor was seventeen. So in the in the nineteen thirties, do you think that's when it's set? It doesn't matter.

I was thinking about this and I was I I had settled on sort of the mid thirties exactly. It's before the war and sort of after the depression, I would think. Well we'll talk some more after the story. And now here's Daniel Muinadin reading Two Pilgrims by Peter Taylor.

Two pilgrims. We were on our way from Memphis to a small town in northern Alabama, where my uncle, who was a cotton broker, had a lawsuit that he hoped could be settled out of court. mister Louder, my uncle's old friend and lawyer, was traveling with him. I had just turned seventeen, and I had been engaged to come along in the capacity of chauffeur. I sat alone in the front seat of the car. The two men didn't discuss the lawsuit along the way, as I would have expected them to do.

I don't know to this day exactly what was involved, or even whether or not mister Louder managed to settle the matter on that trip. From the time we left the outskirts of Memphis, the two men talked instead about how good the bird hunting used to be there in our section of the country. During the two hours while we were riding through the big cotton counties of West Tennessee, they talked of almost nothing but bird dogs and field trials.

interrupting themselves only when we passed through some little town or settlement to speak of the fine people they knew who had once lived there. We went through Collierville, La Grange, Grand Junction, Salisbury. At La Grange, my uncle pointed out a house with a neoclassic portico and said he had once had a breakfast there that lasted three hours. At Salisbury, mister Lauder commented that it somehow did his soul good to see the name spelled that way.

There was even some color still, dull pinks and yellows mixed with reddish-browns, and under a bright, limitless sky, the trees and the broad fields of greyish cotton stalks looking almost lavender in places. gave a kind of faded tapestry effect. After we crossed the Tennessee River at Savannah, the country changed, and it was as if the new kind of country we had got into depressed the two men.

But it may have been only the weather, because the weather changed too after we crossed the river. The sky became overcast, and everything seemed rather closed in. Soon there was intermittent rain of a light, misty sort. I kept switching my windshield wiper on and off until presently my uncle asked me in a querulous tone why I didn't just let the thing run. For thirty or forty miles the two men had little to say to each other.

Finally, as we were passing through a place called Waynesboro, a hard looking hill town with a cement block jailhouse dominating the public square, My uncle said that this town was where General Winfield Scott had made one of his halts on the notorious Trail of Tears when he was rounding up the Cherokees to move them west in eighteen thirty eight.

The two men spoke of what a cruel thing that had been, but they agreed that one must not judge the persons responsible too harshly, that one must judge them by the light of their times, and remember what the early settlers had suffered at the hands of the Indians. Not very long after we had left Waynesboro, Mr. Louder remarked that we were approaching the old Natchez Trace section, and that the original settlers there had been a mighty rough lot of people.

My uncle added that from the very earliest days the whole area had been infested with outlaws and robbers, and that even now it was said to be a pretty tough section. They sounded as though they were off to a good start. I thought the subject might last them at least until lunchtime, but just as this thought occurred to me, they were interrupted. We came over the brow of one of the low lying hills in that country of scrub oaks and pine woods.

And there before us, in a clearing down in the hollow ahead, was a house with smoke issuing from one window toward the rear, and with little grey geysers rising at a half dozen points on the black shingled roof. It was an unpainted, one-story house set close to the ground and with two big stone-end chimneys. All across the front was a kind of lean-to porch. There was an old log barn beyond the house.

Despite my uncle's criticism, I had switched off the windshield wiper a mile or so up the road, and then I had had to switch it on again just as we came over the hill. Even with the wiper going, visibility was not very good, and my first thought was that only the misty rain and the air was keeping the roof of that house from blazing up.

mister Louder and my uncle were so engrossed in their talk that I think it was my switching the wiper on again that first attracted their attention. But instantly, upon seeing the smoke, my uncle said, Turn in down there. But be careful how you slow down, mister Louder warned, this blacktop slick. Already he and my uncle were perched on the edge of the back seat, and one of them had put a hand on my shoulder as if to steady me.

The little house was in such a clearing as must have been familiar to travellers in pioneer days. There were stumps everywhere, even in the barn lot and among the cabbages in the garden. I suppose I particularly noticed the stumps, because a good number were themselves smoldering and sending up occasional wisps of smoke. Apparently, the farmer had been trying to rid himself of the stumps in the old fashioned way.

There was no connection between these fires and the one at the house, but the infernal effect of the whole scene was inescapable. One felt that the entire area within the dark ring of pine woods might at any moment burst into flame. I turned the car off the McAdam pavement and we bumped along some two hundred feet, following wagon ruts that led more toward the barn than toward the house.

The wide barn door stood open, and I could see the figure of a man inside, herding a couple of animals through a door at the other end where the barn lot was. Then I heard Mr. Louder and my uncle open the back doors of the car. While the car was still moving, they leaped out onto the ground. They both were big men, more than six feet tall and with sizable stomachs that began just below the breastbone, but they sprinted off in the direction of the house like two boys.

As they ran, I saw them hurriedly putting on their black gloves. Next They began stripping off their topcoats. By the time I'd stopped the car and got out, they had pulled their coats over their heads, and I realized then that each had host his hat onto the back seat before leaping from the car. Looking like a couple of hooded night riders, they were now mounting the shallow porch steps. It was just as they gained the porch that I saw the woman appear from around the far side of the house.

At the sight of the hooded and begloved men on her porch, the porch of her burning house, the woman threw one hand to her forehead and gave such an alarmed and alarming cry that I felt something turn over inside me. Even the two intruders halted for an instant on the porch and looked at her. I thought at first glance that she was an old woman, she was so stooped. Then something told me, I think it was the plaintive sounds she was making, that she was more young than old.

After her first outcry, she continued a kind of girlish wailing, which, it seemed to me, expressed a good deal more than mere emotional shock. The noises she made seemed to say that this all couldn't be happening to her. Not hooded bandits added to a house burning. It wasn't right. Life couldn't be so hard, couldn't be as evil as this. It was more than she should be asked to bear.

Anybody inside, Miss? my uncle called out to the girl. She began shaking her head frantically. Well, we'll fetch out whatever we can, he called. Glancing back at me, I was trying to make a hood of my own topcoat and preparing to join them, my uncle shouted, Don't you come inside, stay with that girl, and calm her down. With that, he followed Mr Louder through the doorway and into the house. Presently they were hurling bedclothes and homemade looking stools and chairs through the side windows.

Then one or the other of them would come dashing out across the porch and into the yard, deposit on the ground a big pitcher and a wash basin, or a blurry old mirror with a carved wooden frame, and then dash back inside again. Now and then, when one of them brought something out, he would pause for just the briefest moment, not to rest, but to examine the rescued object before he put it down. It was comical to see the interest they took in the old things they brought out of that burning house.

When I came up to where the woman was standing, she seemed to have recovered completely from her first fright. She looked at me a little shamefacedly, I thought. Her deep socketed eyes were almost freakishly large, and I noticed at once that they were of two different colours. One was a mottled brown, the other a grey green. When finally she spoke, she turned her eyes away and toward the house. Who are you all? she asked. We were just passing by, I said.

She looked at me and then turned away again. I felt she was skeptical, that she suspected we had been sent by someone. Each time she directed her eyes at me, I read deceit or guilt or suspicion in them. Where you comin' from? she asked, in an idle tone, craning her neck to see what some object was that had come flying out the window. She seemed abundantly calm now. Without answering her question, I yanked my coat over my head and ran off toward the house.

My uncle met me on the porch steps. He handed me a dresser drawer he was carrying, not failing to give the contents a quick inventory. Then he gave me a rather heavy punch on the chest. You stay out there and keep that girl calm, he said. You hear what I say? She's apt to go to pieces any minute.

The woman was taking a livelier interest in matters now. I set the drawer on a stump, and when I looked up, she peered over me to see which drawer it was I had brought and what extra odds and ends my uncle might have swept into it. On top lay a rusty fire poker and a couple of small picture frames with the glass so smashed up you couldn't make out the pictures. Underneath there was a jumble of old cloth scraps and paper dress patterns and packages of garden seeds.

Seeing all this, the woman opened her mouth and smiled vacantly, perhaps a little contemptuously. She was so close to me that I became aware of the sweetness of her breath. I could not have imagined that her breath would be sweet. Though the skin on her forehead and on her high cheekbones was clear and very fair, there were ugly pimples on her chin and at the corners of her mouth.

Her dark hair was wet from the drizzle of rain and was pushed behind her ears and hung in clumps over the collar of her soiled denim jacket. She was breathing heavily through her parted lips. Presently, when our eyes met, I thought I detected a certain momentary gleefulness in her expression, but her glance darted back toward the house at once.

The two men had pressed on beyond the front rooms and into the L of the house. Now the woman took a couple of steps in order to look through one of the front windows and perhaps catch a glimpse of them back there. We were coming from Memphis, I said. We're from Memphis, but she seemed no longer interested in that subject. It's no use what they're doing, she said, unless they like it.

It's all right, I said, still hoping to distract her. We're on our way to a place in Alabama. They your bosses? she asked. She couldn't take her eyes off the window. No, it's my uncle and his lawyer. Well, they're right active, she commented, but there ain't nothin' in there worth their bustlin' bother. Yet some folks likes to take chances. It's just the worst lot of junk in there. We aired this place from my grandma when she passed on last spring. The junk was all hern.

Just then mister Louder and my uncle came running from the house. Each of them was carrying a coal oil lamp, his right hand supporting the base of the lamp, and his left clamped protectively on the fragile chimney. I almost burst out laughing. It's gotten too hot in there, mister Louder said. We'll have to stop.

When they had set down their lamps, they began examining each other's coats, making sure they weren't on fire. Next they tossed their coats on the bare ground and set about pulling some of the rescued articles farther from the house. I went forward to help, and the woman followed. She didn't follow to help, however. Apparently she was only curious to see which of her possessions these men had deemed worth saving. She looked at everything she came to with almost a disappointed expression.

Then mister Lauder picked up an enameled object, and I noticed that as he inspected it, a deep frown appeared on his brow. He held the thing up for my uncle to see, and I imagined for a moment that he was trying to draw laughter from all of us. It was a child's chamber pot, not much larger than a beer mug. Did you bring this out, mister Lauder? asked my uncle.

My uncle nodded, and, still bending over, he studied the pot for a second, showing that he had not really identified it before. Then he looked at the woman. Where's your child, ma'am? he asked in a quiet voice. The woman gaped at him as though she didn't understand what he was talking about. She shifted her eyes to the tiny pot that mister Lauder was still holding aloft.

Now her mouth dropped wide open, and at the same time her lips drew back in such a way that her bad teeth were exposed for the first time. It was impossible not to think of a death's head. At that instant, the whole surface of the shingled roof on the side of the house where we were standing burst into flames. A few minutes before this the rain had ceased altogether, and now it was as though someone had suddenly doused the roof with kerosene.

My back was to the house, but I heard a loud swoosh, and I spun around in that direction. Then I heard the woman cry out, and I spun back again. mister Lauder set the chamber pot on the ground and began moving rather cautiously toward her. My uncle stood motionless, watching her as though she were an animal that might bolt.

As mister Louder came toward her, she took a step backward, and then she wailed My baby O Lord, my baby, he's in thar mister Lauder seized her by the wrist and simultaneously gave us a quick glance over his shoulder. My uncle snatched up a ragged, homespun blanket from the ground and threw it over his head. I seized a patchwork quilt that had been underneath the blanket, and this time I followed him inside the house.

Even in the two front rooms it was like a blast furnace, and I felt I might faint. The smoke was so dense that you couldn't see anything, an arm's length away. But my uncle had been in those two front rooms, and he knew there was no baby there. With me at his heels, he ran right on through and into the first room in the L, where there wasn't so much smoke, only raw flames eating way at the wall toward the rear.

The window lights had burst from the heat in there, and there was a hole in the ceiling, so that you could look right up through the flames to the sky. But my eyes were smarting, so that I couldn't really see anything in the room, and I was coughing so hard that I couldn't stand up straight. My uncle was coughing too, but he could still manage to look about. He made two complete turns round the room, and then he headed us on into the kitchen.

There wasn't anything recognizable to me in the kitchen except the black range. One of the two window frames fell in as we ran through. The next instant, after we had leaped across the burning floorboards and had jumped off the back stoop of the house, the rafters and the whole roof above the kitchen came down. There must have been a tremendous crash, though I hardly heard it. Even before my uncle and I could shed our smouldering blankets, we saw the man coming toward us from the barn.

You're a fire, he called out to us, but we had already dropped the blankets before I understood what he was saying. He was jogging along toward us. One of his legs was shorter than the other, and he couldn't move very fast. Under one arm he was carrying a little toe headed child of not more than two years. He held it exactly as though it might be a sack of cornmeal he was bringing up from the barn. Do you have another baby? my uncle shouted at him. No, n'ery other, the man replied.

My uncle looked at me. He was coughing still, but at the same time he was smiling and shaking his head. You all right? he asked me. He gave my clothes a quick once over, and I did the same for him. We had somehow got through the house without any damage, even to our shoes or our trouser legs.

By the time the man came up to the house, my uncle had dashed off to tell the woman her baby was safe. I tried to explain to the man about the mistake his wife had made. Your wife thought your baby was in the house, I said. He was a stocky, black haired man wearing overalls and a long sleeved undershirt.

She what? he said, looking at me darkly. He glanced up briefly at the flames, which were now leaping twenty or thirty feet above the framework of the kitchen. Then he set out again in the same jogging pace toward the front of the house. I caught a glimpse of the baby's intense blue eyes, gazing up at the smoke and flames. She thought the baby was inside the house, I said, following the man at a trot.

Like hell she did, he said, under his breath, but loud enough for me to hear. As we rounded the corner of the house, I heard my uncle call out to the woman that her baby was safe. She was seated on a stump with her face hidden in her hand. My uncle and mister Louder once again began pulling rescued objects further away from the house. As the man passed him, mister Louder looked up and said, Did you get all the stock out? Yep, said the man.

I guess you're lucky there's no wind, mister Louder said. And my uncle said, It must have started in the kitchen and spread through the attic. You didn't have any water drawn? The man stopped for a second and looked at my uncle. He shifted the baby from one hip to the other. The pump's broke, he said. It was about wore out, and she broke it for good this morning. Isn't that the way it goes? My uncle said sympathetically, shaking his head.

Then, still carrying the baby, the man shuffled on toward his wife. The woman kept her face hidden in her hands, but I think she heard him coming. Neither of them seemed to have any awareness that their house and most of their possessions were at that moment going up in flames.

I was watching the man when he got to her. He still had the baby under his arm. I saw him draw back his free hand and saw the hand come down in a resounding slap on the back of her head. It knocked her right off the stump. She hit the ground in a sitting position, and still she didn't look up at her husband. D'you aim to get them fellows burnt alive? he thundered. mister Louder and my uncle must have been watching too, because we all three ran forward at the same moment.

Lay off that, mister Louder bellowed. Just lay off now. She knowed this here young unwartin no house, the man said, twisting the baby to his shoulder. I reckon she'd like as not lose her head. That's how come I carried him with me and I told her plain as daylight I was going to. Now you look here, mister, my uncle said. The girl was just scared. She didn't know what she was saying. Probably she couldn't remember in her fright, mister Louder said.

The man stood staring down at his wife. She's feared of her own shadow, and that's how Kama carried him to the barn. Well, you're not gonna beat her with us here, mister Louder said firmly. She was scared out of her wits, that's all. Who sent you all out here? The man asked my uncle, turning his back on mister Louder. Ain't they gon' send no fire engine? It was as he spoke the word that we heard the fire truck coming.

The whine of the siren must have first reached us from a point three or four miles distant, because at least five minutes elapsed before the firetruck and the two carloads of volunteers arrived. It turned out that somebody else had stopped by before we did, and had hurried on to the next town to give the alarm.

I thought it strange that the woman hadn't told us earlier that they were expecting help from town. But of course there was little about the woman's behavior that didn't seem passing strange to me. As soon as we heard the siren, she began pushing herself up from the ground. Without a glance at any of the rest of us, she went directly to her husband and snatched the baby from him.

The baby's little face was dirty, and there were wide streaks on it, where some while earlier there must have been a flow of tears. But his eyes were dry now and wore a glazed look. He seemed to stare up at the flaming house with total indifference. Almost as soon as he was in his mother's arms, he placed his chin on the shoulder of her denim jacket and quietly closed his eyes. He seemed to have fallen asleep at once.

With her baby in her arms, the woman strode away into the adjoining field, among the smoking stumps and toward the edge of the pine woods. There she stopped, at the edge of the woods, and there she remained standing, with her back turned toward the house and toward us, and toward all the activity that ensued after the firetruck and the other cars arrived. She was still standing there with the baby on her shoulder when we left the scene.

We stayed on for only a few minutes after the local fire brigade arrived. mister Louder and my uncle could see that their work here was done, and they were mindful of the pressing business that they hoped to transact in Alabama that afternoon. We lingered just long enough to see most of the articles they had rescued from the flames thoroughly soaked with water.

The sight must have been disheartening to them, but they didn't speak of it. The inexpert firemen couldn't control the pressure from their tank, and whenever there came a great spurt of water, they lost their grip on the hose. They seemed bound to spray everything but the burning house. We withdrew a little way in the direction of our car and joined a small group of spectators who had now come on the scene.

I didn't tell my uncle or mister Louder what I was thinking during the time that we stood there with the local people who had gathered. I could still see the woman down in the field, and I wondered if my uncle or mister Louder were not going to tell some local person how suspicious her behavior had been, and her husband's too, for that matter.

Surely there was some mystery, I said to myself, some question that ought to be answered or asked, but no questions of any kind seemed to arise in the minds of my two companions. It was as if such a fire were an everyday occurrence in their lives, and as if they lived always among such queer people as that afflicted poor white farmer and his simple wife.

Once we had got back into the car and were on our way again, I was baffled by the quiet good humor and even serenity of those two men I was traveling with. The moment they had resettled themselves on the back seat of the car, after giving their top coats a few final brushings and after placing their wide brimmed fedoras firmly on their heads again, they began chatting together with the greatest ease and nonchalance.

I could not see their faces, I had to keep my eyes on the road, but I listened, and presently I heard my uncle launch upon a reminiscence. I did the damnedest thing once, he said. It was when I was a boy of just eight or nine. The family have kiddied me about it all my life. One morning, after I had been up to mischief of some kind, father took me into the kitchen and gave me a switching on my legs with a little shoot he had broken off the privet head.

When I came outside again I was still yowling, and the other children who were playing there in the house lot commenced guying me about it. All at once I burst out at them. You'd cry too if he beat you with a shovel handle I hadn't aimed to say it, I just said it. My brothers kid me about it to this day. Yes, said Mr. Louder, it's like that, the things a person will say. He liked my uncle's story immensely. He said it sounded so true. As he spoke, I could hear one of them striking a match.

It wasn't long before I caught the first whiff of cigar smoke. Then another match was struck. They were both smoking now. Pretty soon their conversation moved on to other random topics. Within the next half hour we got out of that hill country along the Tennessee River and entered the rich and beautiful section to the east of it, near the fine old towns of Pulaski and Fayetteville.

I could not help remarking on the change to my uncle. Seems good to have finally got out of that godforsaken looking stretch back there, I said over my shoulder. How do you mean God forsaken? My uncle replied. I recognized a testiness in his tone, and his reply had come so quickly that I felt he had been waiting for me to say exactly what I had said.

It's just ugly, that's all, I mumbled, hoping that would be the end of it. But Mr Lauder joined in the attack, using my uncle's tone. I wouldn't say one kind of country's any better looking than another, not really. And then my uncle again. To someone your age, it just depends on what kind of country, if any, you happen to be used to.

Maybe so, said I, not wanting to say more, but unable to stop myself. Maybe so, but I could live for a hundred years in that scrubby looking country without ever getting used to it. No doubt the rolling pasture land on both sides of the highway now, still green in November, and looking especially green after recent rain, caused me to put more feeling into my statement than I might otherwise have done, and it may also have had its effect on the two men in the back seat.

There was a brief pause, and then my uncle fired away again. Every countryside has its own kind of beauty. It's up to you to learn to see it, that's all. Then, mister Louder, and if you don't see it, it's just your loss, because it's there. Besides, a lot you know about that country, my uncle went on, in what seemed to me an even more captious spirit than before. And how could you how could you judge, flying along the highway at fifty miles an hour, flapping that damned wiper off and on?

More than that, said mister Louder, with renewed energy, you would have to have seen that country thirty years ago to understand why it looks the way it does now. That was when they cut out the last of the old timber. I've heard it said that when the first white men came through that section, it had the prettiest stand of timber on the continent.

Suddenly I blurted out, but what's that got to do with it? I was so irritated that I could feel the blood rising in my cheeks, and I knew that the back of my neck was already crimson. It's how the country looks now I'm talking about. Anyway, I'm only here as your driver. I don't have to like the scenery, do I? Both men broke into laughter. It was a kind of laughter that expressed both apology and relief.

My uncle bent forward, thumped me on the shoulder with his knuckle, and said, Don't be so touchy, boy. Almost at once they resumed their earlier dialogue. One of them lowered a window a little way to let out some of the smoke, but the aroma of their cigars continued to fill the car, and they spoke in the same slow cadences as before, and in the same tranquil tone.

We reached the town in Alabama toward the middle of the afternoon, and we spent the night in an old clabbered hotel on the Courthouse Square. After dinner that night, the two men sat in the lobby and talked to other men who were staying there in the hotel. I found myself a place near the stove and sat there with my feet on the fender, sometimes dozing off.

But even when I was half asleep, I was still listening to see whether, in their talk, either mister Louder or my uncle would make any reference to our adventure that morning. Neither did he Instead, as the evening wore on and they got separated, and were sitting with two different groups of men, I heard them both repeating the very stories they had told in the car before we crossed the Tennessee River.

Stories about bird hunting and field trials and about my uncle's three hour breakfast in the old house with the neoclassic portico. That was Danielle Muineden reading Two Pilgrims by Peter Taylor. The story appeared in The New Yorker in September of 1963 and was included in his story collection Miss Leonora When Last Seen and 15 Other Stories the following year. It appears also in Taylor's The Complete Stories published in 2017.

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So Danielle, this story starts very much in media race. It starts with we were on our way from Memphis to a small town in northern Alabama where my uncle, who was a cotton broker, had a lawsuit he hoped could be settled out of court. There's so much packed into that first sentence and not a lot of time for us to absorb it because we're already on our way and it's it's very immediate. And then we're almost immediately thrown off because

There's no talk of the lawsuit on the way, the narrator doesn't know what it was about, doesn't know what happened in Alabama, he doesn't know if the suit was settled. So suddenly we're adrift again and we realize the story's going to be about something else. entirely. So that first paragraph is kind of disorienting.

Why do you think Taylor chose to start that way? Aaron Powell It's such a strange story, isn't it, Deborah? I mean, as you say that you sort of fall right into it and then there's immediate there's you know, the story keeps starting several times until finally we encounter the burning house.

But I mean the point he's m I mean is clearly he's embedding the the violence of the fire into the sort of sedateness and the manneredness of the lives of these two men. And part of I think is what's going on is he's sort of he's setting us up for the fire that's going to come with this sort of slow movement forward and b sort of a dri aimlessness that I think puts us off our guard in a kind of useful way. Yeah.

And so we have this drive which does feel sort of Like it's going on a long time and they're they're repeating the same stories about, you know, bird hunting and so on. Yeah. Again and again as they pass through this landscape. And Deborah, they're passing through this landscape which is full of stories. You know, they talk about the the Trail of Tears and the Natchez Trace and You know, th th this is a very inscribed landscape and you you sort of feel it's that

when we do finally get the the violence of the fire, you feel that for them those other stories, the stories that they've imposed on the landscape and on the place are much more important than anything that could happen to them in the present. Which I think is exactly one of the points that Taylor is making. I mean it's it's about storytelling partly the story is. Yeah. Yeah.

And the story that they're telling on the way there is is very much about history, right? They're not exactly seeing the landscape. They're they're saying These people used to live here or I you know, in the past had a very long breakfast in this, you know, neo classic house and this town is is was a stop on the Trail of Tears. And then they're coming to terms with

you know, well that was that was a bad thing, it was a tragic thing, but Scott was trying to do the the decent thing, Winfield Scott. Um so in a way, I I think their observations They don't seem to be actually seeing.

Yeah. And also there's a kind of gentleness and a refusal to judge about the ways in which they move through the landscape, which I found really interesting and which of course will become intri important later when we get to the

story of the fire. But the even, you know, the Trail of Tears and the violence done to the Cherokee and the moo you know, moving the Cherokee off the land and all that, which was, you know, obviously a crime, a great crime, and yet even there these men insist upon giving the

general who was in charge of moving the Cherokee off the land, giving you know, giving him the him due and saying that, you know, for a man of the time it would not have appeared as it does to us now. Uh So there's a kind of a generosity and also a refusal to judge, which I think would be really interesting as we go forward and then come to the the central event of the story where Where they again, I think, refuse to draw any inferences from what they see in a really interesting way.

Yeah. They're really determined to sort of see the best in everything. Yeah. And I I I found that really interesting why I mean, ca it's so it's done so again and so so many times. There's so many points at which Uh Taylor underlines that and it f I found it really interesting that that should be a point that he wanted to make so emphatically. Yeah. Why do you think that is?

Well clearly it's a very strangely shaped story, right? And he's setting us up for the story within the story. And uh and part of what's gonna trouble us throughout, we never find out what actually happened. at the fire. Did the wife set the fire? The husband, of course, it made sense, which it might not to a modern reader, that he was off in the barn uh

setting freeing the cattle because the most important thing they own, the most valuable thing these people own would be the cattle. So of course the man's first concern would be to rush off to the barn and get them out. But still it's a little strange that here he is off, you know, far away, the house on fire. He's released the cattle. He couldn't have that many of them. So he's released the cattle and he hasn't sort of come rushing back to save the house, nor has his wife

really making any effort to rescue any of her stuff. And so there's all this curious uh drama and puzzle at the heart of this. What's happened here? You know, the water pump has been broken and that sort of is mentioned by the husband and so we have to ask, you know, did the did the wife set the fire? Is this something that's going on between them? Uh and yet

you know, we don't find out. They just move on. The the story moves on and we never really get to any sort of conclusion about what actually happened at the fire, other than the fact that that what we saw, which is that the two men save some of the furniture which then gets destroyed by the firemen. Yeah, I mean I suppose that's a that's a touch of realism in the story because

you know, this narrator's not gonna find out. There's no way he would find out. And so Taylor sort of avoids giving us, um, an answer that's not inherent in the story. And also I suppose if the narrator found out that Uh you know, he's telling this retroactively. It would be a different story if he knew the answer to those questions.

Yeah. But it's it's an odd choice to give us so little information about what I mean, you know, of course when when you hear a story, you always wanna know

what happened, you know, that w and and it it's very strange to as a story writer to tell a story in which we never find out. It's an odd little question mark that's at the center of the story. Um But and th that, you know, of course is intentional and I think that tells uh what he's talking about is about wa different ways in which these people these people who are so concerned, the uncle and uh mister Louder, who are so concerned with stories, and yet this story doesn't concern them.

Which is such a fascinating observation and also reflection upon what This sa I mean it says something very profound about southern storytelling and also about southern culture. Yes, and about these men and and what story they want to walk away with and and it seems the story that's important to them is simply the story of their own heroism, yeah.

But they don't even make a point of that, you see. I mean they don't tell it that night, that's true. Not only they did not tell it, they don't even tell it when they're when they've gotten back into the car and are driving off. They light their cigars and immediately turn to their old stories of sort of dogs and dogs in field trials. It for them it's an important part of their attitude to about what they just did, which was very heroic.

as soon as they see the fire, they immediately go they tear their clothes off and go flying into the fire and try to save whatever they can. And then when they find they think there may be a child in there, they show real profound heroism, and yet they're completely uninterested in it. And I think that It's they're not just pretending to be modest. This is truly who they are. They do not

question the fact that of course when they saw a fire, they rushed in and tried to save what they could. And yet they don't think that's an important story. Is it that or is it that the it's not a satisfying story because

i it was all sort of ambiguous, right? You know, this the man whose house they're trying to save y hits his wife and knocks her over. the wife is kind of crazy and lies to them that the baby's in the house and sends them into danger. I mean it doesn't add up to the

Aaron Ross Powell Well th their stories are all sort of rich in s in several senses, you know, field trials and the house where they ate the three hour breakfast. These are sort of easy, gentlemanly stories that you could sort of laugh about them over a whiskey. And as they do that night.

poor, you know, half crazed woman has her house burned down while her husband and her husband then hits her over the head, and clearly it's not the first time he's done that. It's a it's in a way it's a world that they don't want to engage with. they're willing to engage with it in a very dramatic way and when they, you know, effect this rescue

or an attempted rescue, but they're not willing to engage with it in any larger sense. They don't bring this into their world. Yeah. Th they live in a much more ordered and peaceful and gentlemanly world in which, you know, these things sort of don't happen.

Mm-hmm. And it's it's what's interesting is that just the strangeness of this whole event. is fascinating to the nephew, to the the narrator. Right. He's completely um bewildered and curious and so on. And he so he has none of what the the uncle and and the, you know, aptly named Mr. Louder um uh have he doesn't have that sense of sort of decorum and keeping up appearances and falling back on the the sort of manners of a gentleman.

He really wants to know what's going on. He's modern, you see. I mean he's modern in a way that they're not. And that again I think is one of the questions of Taylor is querying here that Clearly there have been sort of changes in the culture. Partly this is about Southern culture and about the way Southern culture has changing has changed.

The boy is much more sort of a northerner in the way he's sort he wants to know all the dirty details about what really happened and you know, he notices that the woman the wife is pretty until he notices that she's not and so on. The uncle and uh Mr Lauder would never notice a thing like that.

Yeah. So the clearly this it's part of what's we're being shown here is the way in which the culture is changing and has changed. That these are people from different generations who are radically different. Aaron Powell And coming to the notion of class.

You know, they don't think twice, the uncle and and Mr. Louder, right? They say pull in, they're already putting their gloves on and pulling their coats over their heads. They jump out of a moving car to dash into this house. Obviously, as the narrator says, th this is a poor white couple, um, not from the same world as these two men. And they don't... You know, there's no sense of that in the way that they behave.

Yeah, what what's interesting, um, Deborah, uh here is that there's almost a kind of rudeness and these are men who are supremely not rude. And yet there's a kind of rudeness in the fact that they completely do not engage with either the woman or the husband.

They they treat them as if they're they're only part of a problem which they had to solve. And the problem th they come there, they see a problem and they solve it to the extent they can and then they go away and they don't think about it again. And there's a kind of contempt in that, which I found surprising.

that it would seem to me really good manners would require them to engage with the people who are, you know, lost their house. You know, there's a there's a tragedy there. Uh and yet s their southern good manners in a way almost required them not to engage. Uh and I found that very interesting and the c an aspect of their manners that I didn't quite understand. There's a lack of sympathy or empathy there that is quite striking. Though in a way th I think they're they're also

mm staying on the side of being respectful, right? Yeah. You know, that they take care of this woman, you know, they're telling the the nephew to take care of her. They're really even quite mild when the when the man hits the wife. It's just like, No, no, no more of that. We're not doing that. My sense is they're trying not to be nosy. Mm-hmm.

They are so nosy. I mean the interest with which they look at all the stuff they pull out of the house. And which which, you know, belong to her grandmother anyway and she's got no interest in it.

She's sort of curious as to what was in those drawers, but she may not have known. Yeah. And then what do you think is going on with the woman? Well, I I couldn't figure it I mean, I've read the story a number of times and

I mean clearly this I mean I don't think we're supposed to know and I don't you know, I don't think we've been given enough information now, that was clearly intentional. But from just from the way in which the wife and the husband uh engage with each other, clearly there was s some s kind of trouble. And he certainly thinks that the fact that the water pump was broken so that the fire couldn't be put out, he seems to find some sort of significance in that.

Either just it was, you know, classic bad luck of this woman or something more. But certainly the narrator doesn't seem to think so. He seems to think there was more to it. Yeah. And it's possible that if she did set the fire, then it's possible that her sort of crying and baring her teeth and yelling about her baby is i is a performance. Yeah. Right. In a way of uh deflecting any suspicion that she said it.

I love the way that mister Louder and the uncle you know, explain away the whole matter with the child, because you know, that's very strange to put two strangers' lives at risk by telling them there's a baby in the house. Um and yet th he manages to explain it away quite perfectly easily with that story of the

Uh if th having been beaten and having lied about it and saying that he was beaten with a shovel instead of with just a little twig. Yeah. Um and so that's supposed to cover that up for themselves. That's their answer to the question of why the hell did this woman do this? But that's a read.

Right. He's they're trying quite hard to cover up. Yeah. There's no direct parallel there. And and really they I I feel that they just want it to be a story in which they did the right thing for some poor people. Yeah. They don't want it complicated. Yeah. And yet he's a he's a you know, Mr. Louder is a lawyer. And uh he's clearly used to examining problems like this in a more thorough way than what they do.

It's a very strange response that they have. And not very human either. I mean m people are we people are so curious and in a way y you have to get civilized that curiosity would have to be brushed out by your manners in order to It your manners would be warring with your curiosity, but it's quite lurid. What's going on here? And yet they're not interested.

Yeah, I feel like they just want a they just want a straightforward, clean narrative in which they're heroes racing into the burning house and saving what they can and they they just don't want that complication. Of course we did the right thing. You know, that's what they would like to I mean the story that they would tell, which they wouldn't even tell, is we saw the fire, we did what we could and we left.

Yeah. Then they would certainly downplay their own heroism. And yet it's a dramatically heroic thing to do.

to, you know, go running into a fire like that. I mean very few people would do that. Aaron Powell Yes, there's a there's an interesting sentence in that moment where the um the nephew looking at them says they look like a a couple of hooded night riders. Yeah, I love that. Um which is just the opposite of what is they're intending to be. You know, the night riders were were terrorists. Yeah. And in fact, um kidnapped uh Peter Taylor's grandfather.

I believe he he managed to escape, but the person who was kidnapped with him was hanged. So there's a family history there. Throwing that throwing that illusion at these two men who were engaged in an act of heroism is a very strange moment. Yeah.

Well that was his own little footnote for his own private. Writers like to do this, to put in little pieces that nobody will know about. Except when we when we study it afterward. Yeah, it's a such a strange story. Um and in terms of the shape of it is so strange. I mean there's n it's not really got a it doesn't, you know, have the classic development of be linked towards a

you know, crescendo and then dropping off. It's got sort of it sort of trundles along and then has this blob in the middle and then trunnels along again. It's it's a very odd shape. And and the first time I read it I found it strangely unsatisfying. It was only as I got deeper into it. It's it's very hidden this story. The one doesn't initially see how much is going on. It's it's uh it's put so laconically um partly.

But as you get deeper into it, th the richness of it emerges. It's it's a it's a very rewarding story, I think. Yeah. And you know, uh we're not the only people with questions, right? The narrator has he's saying surely there was some mystery, some questions that ought to be answered or asked. That Mr. Loudder and the Uncle, as we've said, are not

asking or answering. And the nephew, you know, the nephew is the one telling this story, right? Within it the uncle and Mr. Louder tell stories, but the nephew is telling this story. So it's something that stays with him over time where he he never gets answers. But perhaps through telling telling it perhaps gives him some answers. I mean, as you were saying before, this is also a story about telling stories. I'd be very curious to know

where this came from for Taylor, how he came to write this story. I suspect what happened is that he was driving along one day and saw a burning house. with a wife, you know, been sort of with the tenant far you know, poor white farmers like this. I bet it the grain of the story is something like that. Aaron Powell It's possible, you know. I I saw that um you know the TypeScript, the original TypeScript of the story is in an archive and there's a handwritten note on it.

in Peter Taylor's handwriting that says trip to Alabama with uncle. Uh-huh. Okay. So that doesn't necessarily imply that this happened or that's, you know, drawn from his life. But It could be. Yeah, I bet. I bet. That makes sense then. So he was seventeen but then he probably put together two things. One would be this trip that he took with his uncle, in which this particular thing probably didn't happen.

Um'cause then he would have been writing a story about the trip of the uncle and then he needed then it th it wasn't deep enough and then you would into it put the second story, I suppose. I don't know. We'll never know probably unless the i the notes are very complete. It's fun to speculate on how the devil how the devil he chose this strange uh this strange shape for this story.

'Cause it's an odd one. Yeah. Yeah. What what do you think happens in the the second part of the drive when the narrator doesn't like the landscape and says it's ugly and and they get really angry with him? Yeah. What do you think's going on there? Well I think that there's all these points at which you think that the story that he's gotten the story deep as deep as he's gonna get it.

he, i.e., Taylor, and then you've he manages to go deeper yet. And I find that's really wonderfully done. And I think that's s sort of the final point at which he does that. They th they don't want the boy to make judgments.

this the farmer is, who the wife is. I think that they're almost like refusing judgment that w that you know, there's no such thing as better or worse. And it's all part of I think they they would think of it as being part of their own being gentlemen that we don't think we're better than anybody else.

You know, there's no such thing as absolutes and because we do come from a you know, w from wealthier and more cultured place, therefore we have to be even more careful to not make judgments about places and people in uh situations that are, you know, w ones in which people less fortunate than us are moving about.

There there's a kind of a there's a again I think it's about manners, right? We we're the kind of people who don't draw these judgments. We do there's nothing we don't like. We d we never say country is ugly. In there's no such thing as ugly country. There's only misunderstanding of country. These are very sort of aristocratic almost uh judgments, right? Or an insistence upon not allowing judgment.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And allowing these these people, even as strange as they are, to be endowed with some form of dignity. Yeah, exactly. It's very generous, right? I mean there is a real generosity there. Yeah.

I suppose it it's hard to say if it's the kind of generosity where these men are saying to themselves, All we're all equal, you know, it doesn't matter if some people have money and others don't, or if it's more, you know, what you were saying earlier about there still being a kind of feudal system in the South and, you know, in a sense they're the lords who are who are watching over the peasants.

Um and making sure that that their houses don't burn down. I mean I g I guess if these were people of their own uh class and you know, people in town, say who, you know, their own friends, and they encountered this kind of strange situation, they'd be much more likely to to uh can analyze it I should think. In a way th their refusal to analyze exactly what happened is is is proof of that they are ta are looking at it from a gr certain height.

Yeah. I was reading a review of the collection that the story appeared in from nineteen sixty four in the New York Review of Books and the the critic talked specifically about this story and the end of it. uh that moment where, you know, they they say to the um to the narrator, every countryside has its own kind of beauty, it's up to you to see it, that's all.

And the critics said, Well what the men pretend to see is what used to be there years ago, the prettiest stand of timber on the continent. And the boy is left to learn to see what is not there and to learn man's business of saving the non existent inhabitants of worthless houses. Um So in in this person's uh interpretation I suppose the story's about how life is just a charade and the heroism is a sham because there was nothing worth saving.

Um that seems maybe a more cynical than you or I have. Yeah. Right. He he's he's always generous and gives every I mean, what's wonderful about him m um w among me among other things is that he's he gives each person his due. Mm-hmm. Which of course is s you know, essential to r writing well, I think.

Yeah. Let's talk about the title. Two Pilgrims. So obviously I think the two pilgrims are the uncle and mister Louder, but why are they called pilgrims? You know, they're not really on a very sacred journey. Yeah. I mean, I found that I thought about it a lot because I couldn't figure it out. Um I suppose there's sort of They're there as observers in a certain way, right? I mean they're they're they're there and they you come to a a place and then you you know, they find something there.

I I don't know, I I wasn't able to come to terms with exactly why Yeah, I'm with I'm with you. I don't really know. But I I pilgrims are usually on a sort of holy journey, right? Perhaps it's this idea that they're sort of saintly by running into this burning house and and doing good deeds. Perhaps you know, it's it's intended slightly ironically.

Yeah, I wondered about that. I wondered how much irony was intended. I mean I guess if you were being fanciful, you could say there's something about you know, the the family, you know, the the m the the child and the mother and the father There's something this sort of the holy family, but there'sn't they're not very holy, certainly. Um it's a it's a interesting title.

And and yeah, one that certainly had me thinking. And and you know, they're they are on this journey, but they're on a journey to go to sort of to go to Memphis to settle a I love that they're not they're they're they're they're trying to have it mediated, so they don't have to be a conflict.

So even the whole purpose of the journey is to avoid conflict. Yes to avoid going to court, yeah. Avoid going to court, exactly. So there are pilgrims in that sense too that they're on their way towards that outcome. But uh yeah, I found it I wasn't quite sure. I mean in fact

They have the opposite. Yeah, that's what's so wonderful. But maybe that is the revelation, right? That nothing can shake these men out of their not complacency, but out of their absolutely rigid adherence to the manners that they were born to. Right, to the code.

To the code. I guess that's right. Th this there's so much code in this, right? These are the kinds of guys, A, who when they see a burning house they run into it and try to save everything and everybody, and B, they don't talk about it again. That's all part of the code. Yes, and and and it's quite funny that when the fire brigade actually gets there they're completely incompetent. The people who actually should know how to put out a fire and and rescue people are, you know, it's just spraying.

everywhere but the house. Well that's why you need fancy pants like these two guys to come and do the real work. So do you learn anything from this story as a writer yourself? Yeah. I mean I mean it it's such a one off that it's you know, you wouldn't want to draw too much from it in that way. But um I mean yeah, certainly there's a it's w wonderful how much he's willing to leave unsaid and unexplained.

There's just a l there's a lot of question marks in there and that and it left such a odd taste in my mouth that I'm not sure I would emulate it. Or even this isn't this isn't a template by any Stretch. But yeah, and just in terms of leaving things unsaid and leaving things unexplained and letting that the fact that things are unexplained and unsaid, letting that be part of the meaning of the story, that's certainly very useful.

As something to think about when writing. It's definitely a a uh not a trick, but it's a it's a tactic that makes people uh feel implicated in the story because we are we're struggling to make sense of it. We're struggling to feel what the narrator's feeling or to ask ourselves the same questions. So we're very deep in the story. There's no way not to be. Yeah. And because it's not tied up, it sticks with us.

So that's very useful as a you know, as a as you say, a technique, not a trick. But yeah, the the story did stay with me again and again for a long time because I kept trying to understand it. In a m it does it never you'll never get to make it make perfect sense.

As you can with so many stories where at the end you sort of say, Okay, that's what happened. Here we just don't know. Yeah. We're like the narrator, still thinking about it years later. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Daniel. Yeah, thank you, Deborah. That was really nice.

Peter Taylor, who died in nineteen ninety four, published eleven books of fiction in his lifetime, including the story collections Miss Leonora When Last Seen and Fifteen Other Stories, and The Old Forest and other stories, and the novel A Summons to Memphis, which was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Complete Stories of Peter Taylor was published by Library of America in 2017.

Danielle Muinudin's collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which has been translated into 16 languages, won the Story Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His novel This is Where the Serpent Lives was published early in the world. You can download more than 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, including episodes in which Marissa Silver reads stories by Peter Taylor and

Moinodin, or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in F. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by John. Deborah Driesman, thanks for listening.

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