The first strange thing about Gina Berriault’s The Stone Boy is how quickly the worst thing happens.
Nine-year-old Arnold gets up early one morning with his older brother, Eugie, to pick peas. Arnold brings his rifle. As the two boys climb through a wire fence, the gun catches and accidentally fires.
Eugie dies.
In another story, that might be the climax.
Here, it happens near the beginning.
What follows is much quieter and, I think, much more disturbing.
Arnold does not immediately run home. He goes into the garden and picks peas. When he finally tells his family what happened, the adults around him become almost as disturbed by his reaction as they are by the accident itself.
Why did he pick peas?
Why didn't he come for help?
Why doesn't he cry?
Slowly, those questions become something more dangerous.
The adults stop asking why Arnold behaved this way and begin deciding what his behavior says about him.
And by the end of the story, Arnold has started believing them.
Arnold and Eugie
Before the shooting, Berriault spends a surprising amount of time establishing the relationship between the brothers.
That matters because Arnold's behavior afterward might otherwise seem easier to explain.
Maybe he resented Eugie.
Maybe he didn't care about him.
But the opening makes that difficult to believe.
Arnold is six years younger and clearly looks up to his brother. Eugie teases him about his small size and acts superior in the casual way older brothers often do, but Arnold watches him with fascination.
Berriault tells us:
“Arnold never tired of watching Eugie offer silent praise unto himself.”
There's affection in that observation, even if Arnold would probably never describe it that way.
Later, when the sheriff asks whether he and Eugie were “good friends,” Arnold doesn't know how to answer.
The question itself doesn't make sense to him.
Eugie wasn't his friend.
He was his brother.
And that relationship exists in a category of its own.
Arnold thinks that he “had wanted to be with Eugie more than with anybody else.”
That makes what happens next even stranger.
Why Does Arnold Pick the Peas?
After the gun fires, Arnold kneels beside Eugie and sees the blood rising at the back of his neck.
He calls to him twice.
Then he gets up, takes the washtub into the garden, and begins picking peas.
This is the action everyone will eventually use against him.
But Berriault gives us an important detail while Arnold is in the garden.
His hands feel “strange to him.”
He becomes so absorbed in the repetitive work that he doesn't initially notice the cold pods numbing his fingers.
That doesn't read to me like calm calculation.
It reads more like disconnection.
Arnold has encountered something he cannot understand, so he continues doing the thing he already knows how to do.
Pick the peas.
Move from vine to vine.
Finish the job.
The adults later assume that Arnold has made some kind of rational choice: Eugie is already dead, therefore there is no reason to hurry home.
But nothing in Arnold's actual experience suggests that he thinks through the situation that clearly.
In fact, when he is later asked why he didn't run home, he can't explain himself at all.
He simply says:
“I come down to pick peas.”
That's not much of an explanation.
But it may be the only one Arnold has.
The Sheriff Gives Arnold an Identity
For me, the sheriff's office is the most important scene in the story.
Everyone wants Arnold to explain why he kept picking peas.
Arnold cannot.
The sheriff finally decides to explain it for him.
After Arnold says peas are better picked while they're cold, the sheriff tells the adults that Arnold is either a “moron” or extraordinarily reasonable.
Then he adds:
“It’s come to my notice that the most reasonable guys are mean ones. They don’t feel nothing.”
That sentence changes the story.
Until this point, Arnold knows that his behavior has confused everyone.
Now an adult has supplied an interpretation.
Arnold picked peas because he doesn't feel anything.
And almost immediately, Arnold absorbs that explanation.
As he leaves the courthouse, he notices that Uncle Andy has adopted the sheriff's suspicious look.
Berriault writes that Arnold understands what has happened:
“Andy and his father and the sheriff had discovered what made him go down into the garden.”
The phrasing is heartbreaking.
They haven't actually discovered anything.
But Arnold thinks they have.
The adults possess an authority he doesn't. If they understand why he acted that way, then perhaps they understand him better than he understands himself.
And their conclusion is simple.
He is cruel.
He didn't care about Eugie.
Other People Begin Telling Arnold Who He Is
Once the sheriff provides that explanation, it spreads.
That evening, neighbors arrive at the house to talk about Eugie.
Arnold stays in the room because he hopes his presence will prove something.
He thinks that if he sits where he normally sits and behaves as he normally behaves, everyone will realize that he is “only Arnold and not the person the sheriff thought he was.”
I think this may be the saddest sentence in the story.
Arnold understands that another version of him now exists.
There is Arnold as he knows himself.
And there is the Arnold everyone else is beginning to see.
The second Arnold is cold.
Unfeeling.
Perhaps even dangerous.
Then Uncle Andy publicly tells the story about the peas.
He mocks Arnold's supposed logic. If your brother is already dead, why get emotional? Why cry? Why not simply finish your work?
The men watch Arnold.
And Arnold remains perfectly still.
Which, of course, seems to prove their point.
This creates a terrible trap.
The more Arnold becomes aware that everyone is watching him for evidence of emotion, the harder it becomes for him to show any.
His silence is interpreted as coldness.
That judgment makes him withdraw.
His withdrawal then becomes more evidence of coldness.
The adults are creating the behavior they think they are discovering.
But Arnold Does Feel Something
After the visitors leave, Arnold goes upstairs alone.
For the first time, the story directly tells us:
“He felt nothing, not any grief.”
Taken alone, that sentence seems to confirm everything the adults believe.
But Berriault immediately complicates it.
Arnold feels an “immense silence and crawling inside of him.”
Nothing about that description sounds peaceful.
His grief simply isn't arriving in a form anyone recognizes.
And later that night, we discover just how much he has been suppressing.
Arnold wakes up and goes downstairs to his mother's room.
He calls through the door.
What he imagines happening next completely changes our understanding of him.
He expects his mother to invite him inside. He wants to kneel beside her bed. He wants to bury his head in the blankets and finally tell her about “the terror he had felt when he had knelt beside his brother.”
He wants to hold her.
He wants to grieve with her.
This is not a child who feels nothing.
This is a child who has been unable to express what he feels.
And just when he finally tries, his mother misunderstands him too.
The Real Climax
Arnold's mother tells him to go back to bed.
Then she asks whether nighttime is when he gets afraid.
She doesn't understand why he is there.
And Arnold doesn't try again.
This, more than the shooting, feels like the emotional climax of the story.
He has spent the entire day being told that he doesn't care.
Now, finally, he tries to demonstrate the opposite.
He comes downstairs vulnerable, frightened, even naked, wanting his mother.
And she sends him away.
Her reaction is understandable.
She has just lost a son.
She is exhausted and grieving.
Berriault doesn't turn her into a villain.
But Arnold still experiences the moment as rejection.
Suddenly he becomes conscious of his nakedness and feels that it is “unpardonable.”
That word matters.
The vulnerability he brought downstairs now feels shameful.
He runs back upstairs.
Something has changed.
Arnold Doesn't Begin as the Stone Boy
This is where the title becomes interesting.
At first, The Stone Boy sounds like a description.
Arnold must be the stone boy because he doesn't respond emotionally to his brother's death.
But the story doesn't actually begin with an emotionally dead child.
The Arnold we meet in the opening laughs with his brother.
He admires him.
He feels inferior to him.
He wants to be around him.
After the accident, he feels anxious beside Eugie's body.
Later, he hides in the barn like a “fugitive.”
He notices everyone's judgment.
He desperately wants the visitors to understand that he is still “only Arnold.”
Most importantly, he tries to go to his mother and tell her about the terror he experienced.
The stone boy isn't necessarily who Arnold is.
It's who he begins becoming.
The Ending
The final breakfast scene makes that transformation explicit.
At first, Arnold vows never to ask his family for anything again.
Then his father notices that Nora has not passed him the milk.
He intervenes.
And Arnold feels something unexpected:
relief.
For a moment, he thinks his parents might understand him again.
Maybe they realized why he came downstairs during the night.
Maybe the distance between them can still be repaired.
Then his mother stops him as he is leaving to find a missing calf.
She asks whether he knocked on her door.
Arnold says yes.
Then she asks:
“What’d you want?”
This is the opportunity he wanted the night before.
His mother is finally asking.
But now it is too late.
Arnold tells her:
“I didn’t want nothing.”
And then Berriault gives us the detail that changes everything:
Arnold leaves “frightened by his answer.”
That might be the most important line in the story.
If Arnold were naturally cold, his response wouldn't frighten him.
He recognizes something new in himself.
The boy everyone accused of feeling nothing has begun teaching himself not to feel—or at least not to reveal what he feels.
The adults feared that Arnold was emotionally unreachable.
By the end of the story, their fear has helped make him unreachable.
What Writers Can Learn From The Stone Boy
One of the things I admire most about this story is how Berriault builds character almost entirely through interpretation.
She gives us an unusual action:
Arnold picks peas after his brother dies.
Then she lets different people assign meaning to it.
The sheriff thinks Arnold is coldly rational.
Uncle Andy thinks he doesn't care.
The neighbors watch for signs of emotion.
Arnold's parents become uncertain about their own child.
And Arnold gradually absorbs all of those reactions.
That's a fascinating way to write character because Berriault never has to explain Arnold with a psychological diagnosis.
She lets the gap between behavior and interpretation do the work.
As readers, we're forced into that gap too.
We want to know why Arnold picked the peas.
Berriault never gives us a definitive answer.
What she does show us is the danger of becoming too confident in one.
The Story's Structure
There's also something unusual about where Berriault places the largest event.
The gunshot occurs very early.
After that, almost nothing happens in the conventional sense.
Arnold is questioned.
He sits with visitors.
He goes to bed.
He knocks on his mother's door.
He eats breakfast.
But those quieter scenes carry increasingly greater emotional consequences.
The physical tragedy comes first.
The psychological tragedy develops afterward.
That reversal is part of what makes the story so effective.
A more conventional version might build suspense toward Eugie's death.
Berriault is interested in something else.
She wants to know what happens after the irreversible thing has already occurred.
And more specifically:
What happens when everyone needs an explanation for something that may not have one?
Final Thoughts
At first, The Stone Boy seems to revolve around one disturbing question:
Why does Arnold pick peas after accidentally killing his brother?
The sheriff answers it.
Uncle Andy answers it.
The neighbors seem to answer it.
Arnold's family begins answering it.
Arnold is cold.
Arnold is cruel.
Arnold doesn't feel anything.
But the closer Berriault brings us to Arnold, the less convincing that explanation becomes.
He is confused.
He is frightened.
He is ashamed.
He wants his mother.
And for one brief moment in the middle of the night, he is ready to tell her everything.
She doesn't let him.
By the following morning, when she finally asks what he wanted, Arnold has already begun protecting himself.
“I didn't want nothing.”
The tragedy isn't that everyone correctly recognizes something terrible in Arnold.
It's that they may help put it there.
Arnold doesn't begin the story as the stone boy.
By the end, he is frightened to discover that he may be becoming one.
