The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [214]
“It happened,” he says. “If you wrote it, it happened.”
His saying that, his way of putting it, eases her, makes her more comfortable and confident with her own telling and her own invention. But it also perhaps leads to, or at least explains, what eventually happens this night, which is of course only written but also happening.
A strange thing: at some point she ceases to distinguish between what has been written and what is happening.
She has reached the present in her narrative: she has discovered that her narrative itself has switched from the past tense to the present tense and she is describing time as it occurs. She is surprised to discover herself reading a letter in which she describes what she is doing right now: sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cavern beside Nail’s bed, reading him a letter in which she describes herself sitting cross-legged…
Tiredness might be a contributing factor; for Nail, it could be the effects of the quinine: a strange tinnitus that makes him hear not what she is saying but what he wants her to be saying. Is that it? Is she actually continuing to read from her actually written letter or simply describing aloud what happens as it happens? This is very strange, and no sound comes from Nail, except once when she stops and asks, “What am I saying? What am I doing?” and he observes, “You’re asking yourself, What am I saying? What am I doing?”
All this night she has held nothing back from him. Her whole life, and every thought she’s considered of any importance, has been laid bare to him. Her most secret and private imaginings have been put so clearly to him that they have become his own. Not just with candor, because candor implies a conscious opening up, and she has not been closed to begin with, but with total truth, she has turned herself inside out to him, and as the night wears on she discovers that she is naked and unashamed.
Never before, since her mother first clothed her, has she been naked to anyone except herself. But the nakedness of her body is as nothing; it is almost anticlimax, almost redundant. Especially because she has already written this in the letter too: I have on no clothes now. Now in the glare of coal oil light I am without a stitch. It does not bother me that he is not following suit, because I have already seen him without a stitch, in the death chamber, and because his time to be as bare as me will come later. Now is mine. His turn is later, after I have nothing left to reveal to him.
His turn comes at dawn. On this morning, the beginning of the alternate day of his two-day ague, the day he will not shake from cold or burn from fever or drip with sweat, he realizes that it is his turn, because she has told him everything she has to tell, given him everything she has to give, done for him everything that can be done.
Far off
Well, I’ll be!” I’ll say, seeing Every Dill come walking up to my front porch, carrying a big earthenware bowl with a lid on it. It will be the first time I’ll have had a good look at him since that night when I was eleven and I had to stay at his folks’ house while everybody but me and him went to a funeral, and we wound up in the same bed.
“Good mornin, Latha,” he’ll say, and hold the big bowl out to me. “Maw said fer me to give ye this.”
“Jist set it down there with them others,” I’ll tell him, and gesture toward the porch floor, where there will already be twenty-three assorted bowls, pots, tureens, casseroles, and other containers, each of them steaming with what I know is the same thing that’s in his: chicken and dumplings.
“Yore dog will git it,” he will object, nodding his head toward Rouser and continuing to hold the bowl out to me.
“Rouser’s done et one of them, and licked the bowl clean,” I will point out. “Caint you see how his belly’s all pooched out?