Summary
A consumptive miner, James Herron, exiled to the ramshackle hollers of a West Virginia coal town, erects a crooked pine-board cabin on a wind-scoured ridge, convinced that the thin mountain air might stitch a few more months into his lungs; by his cot sits Fay, the moon-pale child he sired late in life, her eyes milk-white from birth yet radiant with a synesthetic genius that transmutes every cough of the pickaxe into cymbals, every sulfur reek into dragon-breath. Blindness is her palace: she wanders the muddy main street in thrall to her own Scheherazade, recasting soot-caked miners as crusaders, the tipple tower as a minaret, the town harlot as a captive queen. At dusk she slips into an abandoned mine tunnel whose timbers sag like broken wings; there she conjures crystal chandeliers of dripping limestone, a court of gnomes, and—crucially—a vacant throne for the Prince she has never met. Into this chimerical dominion stumbles Crip Halloran, hunchbacked son of the town sot, spine twisted like a gnarled hickory, fingers stained with bootleg tobacco. Fay’s imagination, ever famished for the exquisite, instantly armors the boy in silver lamellar, crowns him with starlight, and dubs him her sovereign. Their clandestine parliament of two survives on stolen apples and whispered sagas until James’s lungs finally surrender; the girl is auctioned off as domestic chattel to a clan of Slavic immigrants whose English is limited to curses and commands. Crip, now exiled from the kingdom he once ruled, haunts the periphery of her servitude like a wounded raven. Salvation—or its cruel facsimile—arrives in Jack Rockwell, prodigal heir to the mining consortium, Harvard vowels wrapped around a polo-toned physique. Jack’s capitalist gaze lands on Fay as if she were a vein of untapped anthracite; he commissions a Pittsburgh oculist to carve sight into her blank globes, underwriting a surgery that rips the veil between reverie and reality. When bandages fall, Fay beholds her hunchback prince as a stunted freak, her gallant benefactor as a gilded opportunist, and the mining hamlet as a scarred necropolis of slagheaps and skeletal tipples. Crip, witnessing the horror bloom in her newly focused pupils, retreats to the cavern, presses a rust-flecked revolver to his temple, and extinguishes the only realm that ever acclaimed him. Jack and Fay, strolling hand-in-hand through their future estate, discover the cooling corpse; Fay’s scream ricochets off the schist walls, a requiem for every fairy tale ever murdered by daylight.
Synopsis
In a squalid mining town in West Virginia James Herron, a consumptive, has built a shack in the hope that the mountain air may prolong his life. With him dwells his daughter, Fay, whom he idolizes. Fay, who has been blind from her birth, has a wonderful imagination. Even the town and its sordid inhabitants become invested with romance and take their part in the stories of adventures that her father reads to her. While Fay goes about with security and fearlessness, which causes the ignorant to regard her with almost religious respect, her inner life is in sharp contrast. She has secret haunts, where she hides, and in thought recreates fairyland. Her favorite retreat is a cavern formed by an old abandoned tunnel which she peoples with knights and princesses, gnomes and fairy guardians. The one thing lacking is the Prince. And one day he comes. The "Prince" is a hunchback, "Crip" Halloran, the son of the village drunkard, who stumbles into Fay's imaginary fairyland, and is at once endowed by her with every heroic attribute. Finally Fay's father passes away and Fay becomes a drudge in the hut of ignorant aliens, and the meetings between her and the Prince are few and far between, and "Crip" is almost heartbroken. Jack Rockwell, son of a rich mine owner, comes to look after his property. Chance throws him in contact with Fay, and he becomes infatuated with her charm and idealism. He is admitted to the kingdom and gradually dethrones "Crip," to the hunchback's bitter distress. In love and pity for Fay's misfortune, Rockwell secures a great oculist and an operation opens Fay's eyes to the harsh world that her fancy idealized. She sees her two devoted admirers as they really are, and shrinks with horror from the poor misshapen "Crip." Broken-hearted, the hunchback seeks the old cavern and with a revolver ends a life that holds nothing but hopeless misery. Rockwell and Fay visit their old haunt, and with years of love and happiness opening before them discover the body of the poor hunchback, who had once for a few happy hours reigned as a Prince in a fairy realm of a girl's imagination.
