Boys And Girls

The narrator’s father is a man of few words. He does not talk to the narrator while they work “unless it [is] about the job,” which makes him “quite different from [her] mother” (Paragraph 11). He raises foxes in order to sell their skins. At the start of the story, the narrator emulates these qualities and this work. He is, she notes, “tirelessly inventive” and interested in adventures (Paragraph 8). Robinson Crusoe is his favorite book, and he saves the “heroic calendars” given to him by the companies to which he sells his furs (Paragraph 1). Ultimately, he reinforces the idea of gender by dismissing the narrator’s disobedience as an indication of her moral weakness: “She’s only a girl” (Paragraph 48).

The narrator’s mother is as hardworking as her father, but she works within the home. While she is “kinder” and “more easily fooled” than the narrator’s father, she also represents a space and a kind of work that the narrator despises. She constantly tells stories, like the narrator, and the narrator sees, in retrospect, that she was likely “lonely” and possibly “jealous” of her father for the attention his children provide (Paragraph 17). Her dislike for the work of killing animals reinforces the separation between the female, animal-free world of fruit canning and the murderous, bloody world of men.

Laird is the narrator’s younger brother. Although the narrator looks after him, Laird seems unconcerned about growing older and assuming manhood. Laird seems confused when he and the narrator witness Mack’s death, yet he begs his father and Henry Bailey to go along to kill Flora, the horse who the narrator releases. Laird is proud “to show off a streak of blood” that represents his role in chopping up the horse for food (Paragraph 46). His assumption of a more adultrole happens around when the narrator’s does, but he does not seem to question or feel anything but pride in his new masculine role, contrasting with the narrator’s shame.

Henry Bailey is the family’s hired hand. He primarily helps the father to manage big jobs, like procuring and killing horses for fox food. He himself has a strange body, with “bronchial troubles” and the “ability to make his stomach growl at will.” He laughs often, but he is also a mystery to the narrator, because “it was sometimes hard to tell what he was laughing at, and always possible that it might be us” (Paragraph 3). Henry plays a role in ushering Laird into manhood, when he offers to the boy to say goodbye to Mack.