Many years ago, walking far downstream where the land is clear, I came across one of these cows, a golden Guernsey lying down in a pasture with her back toward me. I only discovered that she was in fact in absentia by walking around to her front and seeing that she had no insides. She had not so much as one inside that I could see. Her eyes were gone down to the bone, and her udder and belly were opened and empty; there was her backbone. She was dry leather on a frame, like a kettledrum. Her mouth was open and there was nothing in it but teeth. Instead of the roof of her mouth I saw the dark, dry pan of her skull. Both her front legs were broken. They were stuck in the same hole in the ground—a hole two feet across, limestone shards with grass growing on them. The hole was as jagged as a poked egg. How could she have known which step was the false one?
I backed away. Trying to spread my weight, I made a wide circle around her, the way I had come, hoping the ground would hold me and not having the faintest idea what I would do if it did not, or how far I would fall. Back on the riverside path, I turned. Once again, from the back, that hollow golden Guernsey—old skin and-bones—looked, as the saying goes, as though she were only sleeping.
It is limestone country, and toward the town is a mineral springs. Before the turn of the century, people from several cities bought farms here, or built summer houses, so they could take vacations near the mineral springs. Some of these summer people retired here and took to farming. The local farmers, a passive lot, accepted the new gentry—so easily distinguishable in town by their plaid shirts and rubber boots. This was, as I say, around the turn of the century.
Soon the valley became, like so many places, the height of fashion among its own inhabitants. The children of the original summer folk moved here, some of them, and raised their own families here. Then the back-to-the-landers of my generation came, and began clearing land for starveling farms. By then, most of the original farmers had moved to the cities.
The old gentry families and the newcomers got together. They talked about community. They raised barns; they built a Quaker meeting house and used it to organize the blocking of a power project. They held square dances; they blocked a proposal to widen the highway.
They are a people of profound beliefs. They treat cancer with tea. They have come here to abandon society to its own foolishness. They believe in wood heat, unpasteurized milk, and whales. To everyone they are unfailingly helpful.
I meant to accomplish a good bit today. Instead I keep thinking: Will the next generations of people remember to drain the pipes in the fall? I will leave them a note.
Late afternoon: we are inside the cottage now, and baking. I am trying to tell the child a few of the principles by which I live: A good gag is worth any amount of time, money, and effort; never draw to fill an inside straight; always keep score in games, never in love; never say “Muskrat Ramble”; always keep them guessing; never listen to the same conversation twice; and (this is the hard part) listen to no one. I must be shouting—listen to no one! At this the child walks out of the kitchen, goes into her room, and shuts the door. She is this obedient. I have never detected a jot of rebellion in her. If she stays this way she is doomed. On the other hand, I wonder: did she do it for the gag? Even so.
We are baking a cake for Count Noah Very, the neighbor. Here a concern for truth forces me to confess that although I am writing in the present tense, actually some years have elapsed since this weekend in the country. In the course of those years, Noah Very has died. He died of a stroke, and, sadly, was not mourned by kin. His death, of course, makes me recall him with more fondness than I felt for him while he lived, for in truth he was a grouch who despised everyone.
It has been almost thirty years since Noah Very walked us children up to Carson’s Castle. Now Noah is in his seventies. He is a hermit who hides in the woods. He is a direct descendant of Jones Very, the transcendentalist poet who composed “The Spirit Land” and other abstracting sonnets.
When Noah was in his twenties, with a degree in English literature from Yale, he had one of his parents’ servants’ cottages moved to its present location in the woods downstream. He intended, he told me once, to spend a year or two there writing a novel. Somewhere in there he took a false step, like the cow. He got involved milling lumber with which to build bookcases. In his thirties he made a desk. He inlaid the desk’s surface with multicolored veneers in elaborate patterns; he carved the drawer pulls in the shape of veined oak leaves. God knows it is your human obligation to admire this desk if you ever visit him and get past the door—and in fact, I never did see such a wonderful desk.
Many years ago his wife renounced him for his adulteries; he renounced their children, who are now variously spoused and dispersed. Over the years he renounced meat, obligation, soap, work, pleasure, ambition, and other people. When the child delivered to him an invitation just before dinner, he was asleep. Like almost everyone, he considers himself an intellectual. He does his shopping when the store opens; if he sees another car parked at the store, he drives around in a rage until it goes away.
He refuses all visitors but young women and girls. When other people come into his woods, he hides and watches them. He hides in the hemlocks; he hides in a silver maple; he hides among clumps of witch hazel. He hides and watches the people knock on his door. He told me all this. The interesting part is why people visit him at all. Because he is hiding in the woods, he cannot refuse zucchini squash. He is the valley’s sole outlet for zucchini squash.
One woman, incidentally, who brings him gifts of food weekly, and who has not laid eyes on him in four years, told me she likes this feeling of being watched.
Inside the cottage, Noah accepts sherry and cake. He has aged. The bones of his skull are tent poles from which his skin hangs in catenary curves. The back of his skull is small, but his face is large. He is clean-shaven. His bluish mouth usually has a whining or peeved expression, but tonight the mouth, and the man, look pleased. The child, who is feeling particularly charming, has got herself up in a yellow dress; she arranges herself attractively and temporarily on the couch under a side window. Noah sits in a wicker chair by the magazines and explains how he views various magazines. I haven’t seen him in years. I notice with some shock that he is wearing a silk shirt.
It is dark. Outside the whippoorwill is loosening up for a marathon. Actually, I know why the child loves Francis Burn. It is because he is the one to whom she has given her love. But why were we given this fierce love? It beats me. I, too, love one. The child writes poems about Francis Burn and leaves them around for me to find.
“How old are you?” Noah asks the child.
“Nine.”
“And what grade are you going into?”
“Fourth.” She cannot hide a look of contempt. Her whole class is going into fourth grade.
“Do you know I can’t keep track of how old I am? I started losing track of my own age many, many years ago, long before you were even born.” If there is anything the child cannot grasp, it is why some adults try to impress her, and why, even if there were a good reason for it, they go about it so badly.
“My children used to think that was the funniest thing, that someone wouldn’t know how old he was. Do you think it is funny?”
The child says, “I think it is completely ridiculous.”
I am sitting opposite the child, with an ashtray on my lap. Noah, relaxed, is resting his legs on the low wicker table between us.
“One time,” Noah is saying, “when my children were little, and we were all living where I live now, I looked out of the window and saw the children playing by the river. There is a little patch of sand on the bank there. The children were all very young, very small, and they were playing with buckets, and pouring water, and piling sand on each other’s feet. I remember thinking, ‘This is it, now, when the children are little. This will be a time called “when the children were little.”’ I couldn’t hear anything through the window; I just saw them. It was morning. They were all three blond and
still curly-headed then, and the sun was behind them.”
I looked closely at Noah, who was looking at the child.
“I said to myself, ‘Noah, now you remember this sight, the children being so young together and playing by the river this particular morning. You remember it.’ And I remember it as if it happened this morning. It must have been summer. There are another twenty years in there I don’t remember at all.”
He asks how it feels to be here for just a weekend. He explains how well he knows this land and cottage; his grandfather used to own it all. His grandfather planted the apple tree beside the driveway, the apple tree under which we fixed the bike this morning. Now he is addressing the child overheartily, as if she were three. She encourages this. Later she tells me she thinks he is “stupid.” But he catches her off guard. He is lecturing her about his grandfather’s apple tree, in which she has not the slightest interest.
He indicates the window behind her—the yard where his grandfather planted the apple tree. The child, to escape his overexcited gaze, turns on the couch, kneels up against its back, and pretends to look through the window at the apple tree—which, however, she cannot see, because it is dark. She is looking instead at her own reflection. I am just across from her, and can see her in the window.
“Do you know how long it takes to grow an apple tree?”
Noah is leaning forward, and all but singing. “Do you know how long it takes to grow an apple tree?
You’d have to wait
until you were ALL grown up…
and married…
and had FOUR children….”
She is listening. She hears the hard part, about being all grown up, and married, and having four children…. And as he speaks, her eyes slide out of focus, leave the room, and fill with the blank, impossible figures of these strangers. There is a strange, unthinkable female in a yellow dress, and a tall, blank husband beside her. There are these four children of hers. And she thinks, I swear she thinks, I see her eyes widen as she thinks, seeing these blurred children all in a row: The oldest would be older than I am!
I laugh. The child’s eyes snap into focus, and abruptly, delighted, meet my gaze in the window. The woman, husband, and four children vanish. The child sees this: inside the near, shadowed outline of her own reflection in the window, a smaller, distant reflection under a lamp—just me, a woman in her thirties, drinking sherry and smoking a cigarette.
The child is holding my eye, which she sees inside the lighted scene inside the breast of her dress. She is laughing because I laughed and she knows why. She looks at me deeply, the way she does, smiling enormously. I put out my cigarette. The child turns herself around on the couch, and together we resume listening to Noah.
Later, when Noah leaves, I am sad not to be seeing him again for what will likely be such a long time. But Noah says, shaking my hand, that I am silly, that at “our age” there is no such thing as a long time. We are saying good-bye on the grass outside the porch; Noah is taking the path through the woods back home. He has refused a flashlight; he has accepted the cake and several books, among them a Fowler’s English Usage.
Before bed the child and I play several games of spit. She shows no sign of flagging, and it is, after all, Saturday night in this hemisphere, and we are leaving first thing in the morning, so we get out the aspirin again, and find a full deck, and I teach her the pyramid system of betting at blackjack. She likes it. Although it takes many hours of working this system, and much caution, to beat the house by even a little, as I stress, she nevertheless wins six hundred dollars in forty-five minutes, for which the house, by prearrangement, pays sixty cents. Wasn’t there something I wanted to write down?
III
Now it is Sunday morning, mid-July, hotter than blazes, the birds half dead and hushed. We are on our way; we are taking a last look at the river. The water seems lower. The water seems lower, and there’s a bit of chalk moon over the woods downstream. On the way back we will visit my sister, as we did on the way—my sister, whom I love. We have eaten and packed the car.
It is funny how the occasion imperceptibly changes, like the light, at an inconstant rate. At any given glance you may see that the dog has rolled over in his sleep, or the trees have lost their leaves. Morning drains inexpressibly into lunchtime, or Christmastime. Overhead the geese are migrating, just as they were the last time you looked. You wash the dishes, turn around, and it is summer again, or some other time, or time to go.
The child and I are standing by the river. Circling us is the dog, who has been disconsolate since we packed the car. He keeps coming up with the idea of hiding in the woods, and keeps rejecting the idea. The child and I are standing side by side. Beyond the pasture, the mountains have vanished in haze. The cows are absent. Over the river the sycamore branches hang wooden without wavering; light from the water wobbles around the branches’ undersides and flat across the bottoms of their leaves.
“I’m not going,” the child says. “I’m staying here.” Some speculation ensues about who is in charge of granting wishes. We watch the water striders. We are, alas, imagining ourselves in the future remembering standing here now, the morning light on the green valley and on the clear river, the child playing with the woman’s fingers. I had not thought of that before we came, that she would be playing with my fingers, or that we would hear trucks shifting down to climb the hill behind the cottage. We turn to leave.
And leaving—let me add by way of epilogue—we find ourselves on the receiving end of a tiny, final event, a piece of unexpected wind.
A ripple of wind comes down from the woods and across the clearing toward us. We see a wave of shadow and gloss where the short grass bends and the cottage eaves tremble. It hits us in the back. It is a single gust, a sport, a rogue breeze out of the north, as if some reckless, impatient wind has bumped the north door open on its hinges and let out this acre of scent familiar and forgotten, this cool scent of tundra, and of November. Fall! Who authorized this intrusion? Stop or I’ll shoot. It is an entirely misplaced air—fall, that I have utterly forgotten, that could be here again, another fall, and here it is only July. I thought I was younger, and would have more time. The gust crosses the river and blackens the water where it passes, like a finger closing slats.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNIE DILLARD is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.
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Books by Annie Dillard
Modern American Memoirs
The Annie Dillard Reader
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The Maytrees
For the Time Being
Mornings Like This
The Living
The Writing Life
An American Childhood
Encounters with Chinese Writers
Teaching a Stone to Talk
Living by Fiction
Holy the Firm
Copyright
TEACHING A STONE TO TALK. Copyright © 2007 by Annie Dillard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
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