The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [213]
“I’m thinking,” she says, and puts the tree charm back against his chest. Nestled there in the golden hair of his chest, the golden tree is like a mighty oak in a thicket of brambles. “I have a letter for you, if you’d like to read it.”
“You bet,” he says.
“But it’s nearly two hundred pages long.”
“What else have we got to do?”
She gives him a sidelong glance, and then she gives him a mock punch in the ribs. “You,” she says. And then she says, “We’ve got lots else to do. For one thing, we’ve got to eat. I’d better start supper. What would you like?”
“Chicken’n dumplins,” he announces.
“Sorry,” she says. “The eggs haven’t hatched yet. And besides, I don’t know how to make dumplings. But tomorrow I’ll go get your mother to teach me.”
Nail laughs: the first she’s heard him laugh in a long time. “You honestly would do that, wouldn’t ye?” he tells her, delighted.
No, not only have the eggs not hatched, but there are no chickens to lay them. She wonders if they could keep a flock of fowl in this glen of the waterfall. Would the varmints of the woods get them? But she has seen no varmints. If there are wolves or bears hereabouts, they haven’t made themselves visible.
For their first meal together, she is obliged to put together a light supper of crackers, cheese, and a tin of sardines. But she discovers she has no appetite at all, not because the offering isn’t appetizing. And he discovers he hasn’t any appetite whatsoever, not because he’s ill.
Love has no stomach.
The supper uneaten, they keep close, she sitting cross-legged beside the pallet of his bed, he lying. After a while he suggests, “You could read it to me.”
“What?”
“The two-hundred-page letter.”
“Oh,” she says, and again: “Oh.” The light in the cavern is just enough to read by, but it won’t remain that way long. She’ll have to get up and light the kerosene lantern after a time. “Well.” She thinks awhile, then says, warningly, “I’ll blush terribly over parts of it.”
“I’ll like to see ye blush,” he says. “I bet it makes your pale skin look healthy.”
She laughs, but also warns, “I don’t think I could even stand to read parts of it. Parts of it I wrote thinking you’d not even be near me when you read them.”
“If you love me,” he tells her, “you could read it all.”
That’s true. She says, “That’s true, but parts of it are going to make me sound most unladylike.”
“Those will probably be my favorite parts,” he says. “Let’s have it.”
“Promise you’ll never laugh.”
“Aint there no funny parts?”
“Not deliberately funny,” she says.
“Well, I won’t laugh unless I hear ye laughin first.”
She could always, she realizes, skip some of the parts. She could always censor part of it, and he’d never know…until the time came that he might want to read it over to himself, and then if he found the parts she’d censored and wondered why, maybe he would understand. Nail Chism, she honestly believes, will always understand.
So she gets up, and from one of the sacks in the cavern she fills her straw hat with oats, and takes it out to Rosabone, and sets it down where the mare can eat the oats. “Don’t eat my hat,” she says. Then she gets the bundle of letters out of the saddlebag. She pats the mare’s neck and speaks some last words to her: “You’ll hear me talking, Rosabone. All night long you’ll hear me talking, but I won’t be talking to you. You get some sleep, and we’ll go back to the village in the morning.”
All night long the mare hears her mistress talking. But surely, sometime in the night, the mare dozes off.
Viridis Monday holds nothing back. She reads it all. Once, after lighting the lantern and resuming, she asks him, “Is this boring you?”
“I thought you’d know me better than to ask a question like that,” he says. “Don’t stop.”
But once again, much later, she interrupts herself to ask, “Does that shock you?”
He is smiling, not with mirth but with pleasure. “I reckon I can stand it,” he allows, offhand.
And again, when she comes, in time, to the story of the night she thought she was going