Frowning, he looked as if he were trying to scry the back of his skull like a cave wall. She and Pete hated to interrupt, to chivvy him forth and try to make him drink. He was tied up elsewhere. He was lowering away. Davits started to swing.
Lou wondered where his information would go when he died. Would filaments of learning plant patterns on earth? Would his brain train the sinking plankton to know their way around the seafloor from here to Stellwagen Bank? Her brain would deliquesce too, and with it all she had learned topside. Which was not much, she considered, nor anywhere near worked out. Bacteria would unhook her painstakingly linked neurons and fling them over their shoulders and carry them home to chew up for their horrific babies.
She watched a wave strand a white skate inverted. It scraped back and forth in the waves for an hour, openmouthed.
Clams squirted in the bucket by the door. Pete dug them at low tide. Now the ocean ponderously tilted in its basin to flood North America a grain at a time. She and Pete sat by the bed where Maytree had lain indoors and unconscious, or bored stiff, for two days. He neither ate, drank, eliminated, opened his eyes, or turned. She watched his clavicle. A piece of brilliance found his face through the French doors; it wrapped his features in shape-shifting trapezoids as clouds passed. The room and all its glass faced south. Yankee the box turtle stretched like a blindworm to warm its neck.
She told Pete that Maytree would live till the next ebb. —Since when are you superstitious? Pete said. The clams had soaked his blue jersey. It’s even odds. She did not answer.
Maytree made a fist. The woman wore a long red shift. She stroked him—Algreba, the brow. The little she retained; all she had yet to think through in her time left. Replaceable gulls. For all she knew she had seen the same gulls over and over.
She lifted thin slips of his hair between spread fingers and let them slide. He used to fall asleep when she cut his hair. She dripped water between his lips from a clean cloth’s corner. With her finger, she painted his mouth in bacon grease.
Would he remember, at least at first, to watch for its own blue seas’ palming the earth?
About the Author
ANNIE DILLARD has written eleven books, including the memoir of her parents, An American Childhood; the Northwest pioneer epic The Living; and the nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A gregarious recluse, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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ALSO BY ANNIE DILLARD
Trilogy
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Holy the Firm
For the Time Being
Memoir
An American Childhood
The Writing Life
Narrative Nonfiction/Travels
Teaching a Stone to Talk
Theory
Living by Fiction
Poems
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
Mornings Like This
Journalism
Encounters with Chinese Writers
Fiction
The Living
Credits
Jacket Design by Mary Schuck
Copyright
THE MAYTREES. 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.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061809743
06 07 08 09 10
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Epilogue
About the Author
Also By Annie Dillard
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher