So I’ve been reading my way through all the odd-year Best American Short Stories. (Why only the odd year editions? Well… Look, I have a system. I’m sure you have a system. Maybe your system works for you. My system works for me. Let’s just leave it at that.) I most recently tackled the 2009 edition, and while it was predictably excellent throughout, Ethan Rutherford’s “The Peripatetic Coffin” was my favorite piece.

“The Peripatetic Coffin” is based on the true – and truly insane – story of the Confederate submarine, the H.L. Hunley. (For the spoiler-conscious among you, I’d advise not looking it up until you’ve read the story.) It’s one of those premises that will make you squeeze your head and go, “Ah! If only I’d thought of that!” But then, a second later, you’re thanking your lucky stars that you didn’t think of it, because, Oh, my God, a Confederate submarine?! Like, how would you pull that off, anyway? How would the characters talk? How would nineteenth-century people even regard the idea of a submarine? What’s the specific history and what details do you use and what details do you not use? How the hell do submarines even work? It’s such an eccentric bit of history, you’d have to fearless to take it on, and canny as hell to pull it off.

Well, it turns out Ethan Rutherford is fearless and canny. His approach to the story is brilliantly straightforward. While sticking to the basic facts – the Hunley was extraordinarily dangerous, the soldiers who manned it obviously knew that, and the entire gambit was a desperation move on the part of the Confederacy – Rutherford channels the eccentricity through the characters of the Hunley’s crewmen.

These men are bleak about their prospects. One man refers to the view of the Charleston naval blockade as the “Tableau of Lessening Odds.” On learning that other soldiers have been taking bets on how soon they’ll all drown, the narrator drolly remarks of the crew’s reaction, “We resent the implication.” Later, when the men are piloting the packed, creaking, rudimentary submarine/death trap, someone clowns like a pirate, singing, “Yo ho ho.” What initially seemed so improbable, in spite of its historical reality – i.e. a submarine in the Civil War – is swept forward by virtue of the hilarious gloom. Whether or not an actual nineteenth-century soldier would use words like “tableau,” or “officiousness,” or “ontological” is irrelevant. All that’s significant is that their point-of-view is completely correct for their situation – what person in their right mind wouldn’t be bleak given the circumstances? – and that Rutherford is consistent.

As the strange narrative pushes toward its inevitable conclusion, it takes on tragic undertones. The crewmen of the Hunley are brave, but they are also pathetic – pathetic in the futility of their assignment, pathetic in their support of the doomed and immoral Confederacy, and pathetic in their ultimate fate as archeological subjects.

It’s a virtuoso piece of writing, and I haven’t even touched on the physical stuff, all the writing about the submarine itself, which feels totally authentic. “The Peripatetic Coffin” is funny, original, and just a really, really good story. You can find it in The Best American Short Stories 2009 edited by Alice Sebold, and you can visit Mr. Rutherford here.

Cheers,
Owen