Women & Children First
By Bill Oliver
Mid-List Press 4324-12th Ave. S. Minneapolis, Minn. 55407-3218, $14

I’m always intrigued when I read stories written by a male author in which the main character is female.

To me this is the true test of a writer. Can they truly become this character so convincingly that I forget the author is not the same gender? Bill Oliver can and does. Expertly. Beautifully. His female characters are maybe even more real than his male. Whatever. Both are good and his stories hold the reader from absolutely reader-grabbing opening to perfect end.

Bill Oliver is an English professor at Washington and Lee University and director of the Writing Center at Virginia Military Institute. Women and Children First won the First Series Award for Short Fiction from Mid-List Press. The award which includes publication is given annually for “an outstanding manuscript by a writer who has never published a book-length collection of short fiction.”

Oliver’s best stories deal with long term marriages and impending death of one partner. “In Roger’s Garden,” Martha opens the story “on her hands and knees, with certain knowledge the earth she’s scratching will have him soon. She lifts the clawed tool above her head, brings it down hard, and is once again surprised and angered by how little give there is to this dirt. As if her husband had not been coaxing flowers from it every spring and summer for more than 30 years. She looks up at Roger’s bedroom window, its white shade drawn…a barrier as unyielding as this ground. It’s his idea she should bring in the garden. There’s no one else to do it.”

The last line is a clue to the estrangement of their only child, Nancy, whose name has not been spoken by her father in three years. Martha cannot forgive her daughter for not coming to see her father in his last weeks and days.

“I will never forgive Nancy for not coming,” she said each word deliberately, right to God. A sin in anyone’s book.”

To Roger she thinks, “If you’re so damned smart, then, why don’t you tell us what it’s like to die all alone?” Roger has refused communion, prayer with their priest, instead he fakes sleep. “She bends over him, puts her ear close to his lips, as if waiting to hear a secret. The feel of his breath on her cheek momentarily reassures her.”

Oliver’s stories end with just the right click that carefully closes the box and the reader feels a satisfaction, sighs “Yes,” that’s it. And goes on to be let in on another life.

He writes of cleaning ladies and somehow knows how they must feel about their employers. And a member of a janitorial staff in a university who doesn’t ’peak, read or write English, but develops a crush on a professor to the point of composing a love letter. Or he writes of a man suffering insomnia who despairs of his wife who can sleep through anything. “She’s a good sleeper, my wife. It’s hereditary. Her mother and father, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews, all are prolific dozers and nap-takes. You should see the family gatherings, check out the scene at her parents place after a holiday feast. They’re sprawled on couches and in chairs, on the floor, heads flung back, mouths agape. So many insensate bodies, in such attitudes of deep slumber! You wouldn’t expect to find anything like it outside a nursery, or an opium den.”

Oliver’s stories heretofore have been published in literary journals, but deserve a wider readership. In a more reader-friendly publishing world, they would appear in places like the New Yorker, Harper’s or Atlantic. He knows the craft of short story and to nail each word down tight.