OLD RED
by Caroline Gordon, 1963

The story "Old Red," by Caroline Gordon, describes a quiet crisis in the life of Aleck Maury, who at a family reunion reviews his 60 years of life and finds them wanting. Maury is viewed as the family idler and wastrel, a failed classics teacher, now a widower, whose only passion in life has been hunting and fishing, rambling in the woods with black field hands and white trash tenants.

Maury contemplates his daughter Sarah and her young husband Stephen, whose innocent love for writing and literature disgusts the world-weary Maury. He rejects the life of the mind and of art that Stephen and Sarah represent, and he meditates on fleeting time, as if a narrator of a carpe diem poem:

Time, he thought, time! They were always mentioning the word, and what did they know about it? Nothing in God's world! … Where, for instance, had this year gone? He could swear he had not wasted a minute of it, for no man living, he thought, knew better how to make each day a pleasure for him.

Escape is much on Maury's mind. He has consciously evaded family responsibilities and powers for half a century in exchange for a life in nature, a life among the poor, unpretentious rural people who live close to nature, who can "smell out fish." Young Stephen, with his whole life ahead of him, spends his days indoors meditating on the sonnet "in the form in which it first came to England" and on such esoterica as the poetry of John Skelton. Maury, on the other hand, admires Jim Yost of Maysville, "a man of imagination" who makes the Devil Bug lure, although Maury regretfully boasts, "I myself had the idea thirty years ago and let it slip by me the way I do with so many of my ideas."

Maury reviews his past, thinking of himself and of his dead wife Mary "when they were the young couple in the house." His marriage seems a failure, a domestic war of attrition. His life has been a series of constraints and defeats, Maury feels, and now his old age and impending death represent the ultimate skirmish.

Maury takes his son-in-law fishing in order to induct him into the world of freedom and intuitive knowledge, the hard-won empiricism of humans against nature. It is experiential learning, the use of time, that he seeks to teach, in contradistinction to the precious book learning he has rejected: "His daughter had told him once that he ought to set all his knowledge down in a book. 'Why?' he had asked. 'So everybody else can know as much as I do?"' When Stephen asks if he prefers fishing to hunting, Maury says, "A man has got to come to himself early in life if he's going to amount to anything." By the measure of his family and of genteel middle-class society, Maury—who was once an esteemed professor—has failed to amount to anything, but by his own lights he has seized the day and wrung out its value. He crafts gentle irony in summarizing the fishing expedition to Stephen: "Ain't it wonderful … ain't it wonderful now that a man of my gifts can content himself a whole morning on this here little old pond?"

In the course of his reminiscence Maury recalls a fabled quarry, "one fox, they grew to know him in time, to call him affectionately by name. Old Red it was who showed himself always like that there on the crest of the hill." Old Red becomes a totem for Maury, an emblem of escape, freedom, imagination, and self-sufficiency, everything he values in life. Through his imagination he becomes a foxhunter, then a companion of the fox, and finally, by empathic alchemy, the fox itself.

Maury then conceives a foxy plan to escape the constraints of his family and the present and to go fishing. Like the old fox, the animal he has studied all his life, the old professor will have stolen away, lost to the baying hounds of respectability and responsibility, the traps and barbs and snares of life. Maury's life is back in order. He is himself again.

—William J. Schafer