The Gift of Gall

A short short story entitled “Gall,” by Ben Fergusson, was published in this past summer’s issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Jamel Brinkley. The piece opens with a description of the father of the Lawrences driving their car with the whole family in tow onto some tracks into the path of an oncoming train; the first-person narrator then describes how kids used to joke about the ensuing accident at school, how he used to imagine being in the car himself, and how kids always rushed to tell new students the story of the accident. The train pushed the car off the road so that the father was injured but the kids in the back were miraculously unhurt. The Lawrence kids kept to themselves at school after that, but the narrator finally talked to one of them, David, years later when they are both working on the lighting for a school play, and the narrator observes and admires David’s facility on the job. When the play is over, David gives the narrator an “oak apple”–a wasp’s nest, now empty–and invites the narrator to the changing rooms, where they kiss. They don’t discuss the accident directly until a decade later, on their honeymoon, when the narrator says everything after the accident must have “felt like a gift,” to which David responds: “’No. The gift would’ve been it not happening.’” The narrator never thought about it this way; he also thought they’d move away once they were married, but they don’t. Now when they’re stopped at the train tracks at the site of the accident, he has to look away from David’s hands on the steering wheel like he used to look at his mother’s and get scared she’d drive them onto the tracks.

The story spans a number of years, so that in a sense the chronic tension of the accident on the train tracks is treated acutely. The story’s climax is the exchange between David and the nameless narrator on their honeymoon as adults, an exchange that’s predicated on the chronic tension of the accident that happened when they were kids. The story walks the line of treating the accident as chronic rather than acute tension in the way it opens describing the accident almost in scene, but not quite; at the end of the first paragraph we’re told “That’s how their mother, Gerry, told it.” This statement thus positions the accident as past (or chronic), rather than present (or acute). But there’s no acute timeline as the story skips across the years. If you had to identify the acute tension, it would be something like the narrator and David’s relationship, and/or the narrator’s understanding of David–or more specifically, the narrator’s understanding of David’s understanding of the accident.

Which raises the interesting aspect of scene construction–how many “scenes” are there in this short piece that mostly summarizes decades of time? It’s a general rule of thumb that if there’s direct dialog, it means characters are speaking in “real time,” which would thus constitute a scene. But the exception is conditional time, which is what we’re in when we get the first direct in “quotations” dialog in the piece: his mother “would say, ‘It’s a miracle that any of them survived.’” The conditional “would” indicates this happened many times, thus this a description of general time rather than specific time. The only dialog exchanges that do not take place in this conditional time, but rather take place in an actual, single, specific moment of time are dialog exchanges with David–which means the scenes pivot around David, and so David constitutes the story’s true acute tension.

The accident is the story’s organizing principle, structurally, echoing the way it becomes an organizing principle in David’s life–or rather, the way the narrator imagines it to organize David’s life, an idea he’s disabused of in the narrative’s climactic epiphany. In reconceptualizing the figurative “gift” of his life for the narrator–with this reconceptualizing being a figurative “gift” in and of itself–David essentially re-enacts an earlier moment in the story when he gave the narrator a literal gift, an “oak apple,” or wasp’s nest. This is the second of three scenes. The first actual scene is the narrator’s first interaction with David–and “first” means one specific, isolated moment in time:

I didn’t share a word with any of the Lawrences for years after the accident. Not until the school was rehearsing a production of The Tempest, and I climbed the lighting rig in the sports hall to find David Lawrence trying to peel a scarlet gel off the front of an ancient lantern.

“You doing lighting this year?” I said.

We then go back into summary for his observations of David during the period they’re working on the play together, and go into our second specific scene at the play’s end, the moment of the literal gift exchange that then facilitates a romantic exchange. The exchange of the oak apple gets more focus than the exchange of the following kiss, which slips back into summary, but summary that Fergusson deftly renders specific with the descriptive touch that enables him to get away with a story that is mostly summary:

And this gift of an oak apple seemed to be reason enough to go with David to the changing rooms, in which we had undressed in front of each other before football, rugby, and basketball countless times, our attention on other boys whom we knew better. The changing rooms that had been converted to dressing rooms for a week for the play, but in which the smell of grease paint could not overwhelm the smell of feet and sweat and where I kicked over the thunder sheet when he kissed me.

We’re in summary for almost all of this, but it’s sensory summary, and you could argue that it culminates in scene: “I kicked over the thunder sheet when he kissed me.”

Then we get the third and final scene, again constituted by a dialog exchange specifically with David, the one on their honeymoon. A story in three exchanges: when he first interacts with David at the beginning of the play, when they exchange the oak apple and kiss at the end of the play, and the honeymoon exchange that reconfigures the narrator’s understanding of David’s understanding.

This climactic reconfiguration pivots on trauma in a way that made me recall a challenge to leaning on trauma as a chronic tension trope in the New Yorker article “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.” Does chronic tension have to be trauma? Is the model of framing a story through chronic and acute tension necessarily conceiving of story as a sickness? In a way that flattens story and sickness alike?

The chronic and acute tension framework for narrative seemed to illuminate the way stories are supposed to “work” for me in a way I had never fully grasped before hearing of these categories. It has occurred to me that the reason this framework resonated with me is not unrelated to the fact that the year I learned about this concept, almost a decade ago now, was the same year my father was diagnosed with leukemia, at which point I learned that there are two different types of this illness–chronic and acute. The story goes that after my father received the diagnosis from his doctor, he came home and told my mother that he had leukemia. She then got on the internet and discovered the different types and their natures: acute leukemia was essentially a death sentence, while chronic leukemia could be managed with (extremely expensive) medication. The doctor’s office was closed by this point. My mother asked my father which kind the doctor had said he had. My father said acute. They spent the night thinking he was about to die. But it turned out my father was mistaken; his was the chronic kind. To avoid future miscommunications, my mother went with him to all of his doctors’ appointments after that.

So we see that the distinction between chronic and acute can be the difference between life and death…

David’s climactic reconfiguration might pass muster with the “Trauma Plot” naysayer-author (who at times seems to just want to be provocative) because it offers a reconfiguration of the significance of trauma to a character: the narrator has one conception of how this trauma has affected David, and he turns out to be wrong. Thinking that all of David’s post-accident life must be a “gift” for him is a version of considering David’s life to be defined by this accident-trauma, and that’s the real gripe the “Trauma Plot” author seems to have–characters, people, should not be defined by their trauma. True. That David doesn’t need to leave the place where the trauma happened to him further underscores that it does not define him.

Now let’s circle back to the title: “Gall.” This is the reason I clicked on the story when I saw it in the Ploughshares newsletter, but if I had read it for any other reason, I would have had no idea what the significance of the title was. The reason I clicked on it was that I had been reading about wasps after looking at their prominence in Stephen King’s The Shining, during the course of which I encountered an article in my alumni magazine about a new species of “gall wasp” being discovered on the campus of Rice University. These wasps (or at least some species of them) live exclusively in oak trees, which the campus is a veritable arboretum for; multiple new species of wasps have been discovered there.

But where does “Gall” take place? A couple of place-names are invoked, including the names of streets in the story’s opening line, but the town and larger location is never named. The use of “mum” is the first indicator that we’re not in America, with the “Tesco carpark” confirming this has to be in the UK, with Tesco being a major grocery chain there and “carpark” UK-speak for the American “parking lot.” Turns out the UK has oak trees, too, then… what’s interesting to me is that the story never explicitly makes the connection between the use of the oak apple wasp’s nest–it’s a unique feature of the “gall” type of wasp to make the “oak apple” their nest–and the “gall” of the title. Had I no outside knowledge of wasps, I would have assumed that the “gall” of the title meant the only thing I knew it to mean before my wasp reading, “bold and impudent behavior,” to cite the first dictionary definition (the second is fluid from the gall bladder). (And apparently gall has associations with poison in the Bible.) In this case, I probably would have assumed the “gall” of the title was referring to the father’s impudence in driving the family car onto the train tracks. Or maybe the narrator’s gall in thinking he understood what the accident meant to David.

Since it would have to be a gall wasp that nested in the oak apple, that “gall” gets the title underscores the importance of the function of the oak apple in the story:

At the wrap party, he showed me an oak apple that he carried around in his pocket. I saw in the brighter light of the Sixth Form common room that his nails were bitten to the quick.

“Can you eat it?” I said.

He laughed to himself. “No. It’s not a fruit. It’s a nest for a wasp.” He put it in my hand. It was smooth, and I saw that there was a perfectly round hole where the wasp must have burrowed its way out.

When David offers the narrator this literal gift, it enables the narrator to literally see something revealing about David via the bitten nails. The narrator also initially misinterprets the oak apple’s function by thinking it’s for eating, just as he misinterprets the meaning of the accident to David. And the physical description with the hole the wasp burrows out of evokes a sense of escape, echoing the car that David managed to escape from.

It’s certainly not necessary to have an understanding of gall wasp biology for the story to work, but an understanding of it does enrich the symbolism. Gall wasps are “parasitoid” wasps:

The vast majority of hymenopterans are hidden among the tiny and obscure parasitoid wasps. Parasitoids are insects that lay their eggs in (endoparasitoids) or on (ectoparasitoids) other organisms. When the egg hatches into a hungry larva, it proceeds to eat the living host alive as it grows. Parasitoids should not be confused with parasites, which spend their whole life living in or on a host, rather than just the larval stage.

Seirian Sumner, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps (2022).

David can hatch/grow out of his trauma/accident, not remain chained/bound to it for his entire life. But something else has happened to the gall wasps:

Other parasitoid-turned-veggie wasps have become the strangest farmers on the planet. These are the gall wasps (Cynipidae). Like the eruptions on a teenager’s acned chin, gall wasps cause nodules to grow on a wide range of trees, including oak, Southern Beech and rose plants. The wasps appear to induce the trees to grow protective casings around their eggs, which are laid on the undersides of leaves or stems. As if protection wasn’t enough, the plant also provides the developing wasps with nourishment. Unlike the fig wasps, there doesn’t appear to be any synergistic benefit between wasp and plant: the growth of the gall seems to be under the control of the wasp, not the plant. The plant is therefore providing a service to the wasp, without any benefit to itself. How these small insects (no more than 1–8 millimetres in length) are able to manipulate the growth of the tree remains elusive. Other gall wasp species don’t bother making their own galls and instead lay their eggs inside those of ‘honest’ galling wasps. These parasites have evolved as a lineage embedded within the honest gallers.

Seirian Sumner, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps (2022).

The gall wasp controls its host environment, not the other way around. David is the gall wasp, so it’s fitting that he’s the one in control of this exchange, that he is the one who leads the narrator to the “changing rooms.”

-SCR