The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

by Annie Dillard

  There is, in short, one country, one room, one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person: but I am myself hollow. And, for now, there are the many gods of mornings and the many things to give them for their work—lungs and heart, muscle, nerve, and bone—and there is a no-man’s-land of many things wherein they dwell, and from which I seek to call them, in work that’s mine.

  So I read. Armenians, I read, salt their newborn babies. I check somewhere else: so did the Jews at the time of the prophets. They washed a baby in water, salted him, and wrapped him in cloths. When God promised to Aaron and all the Levites all the offerings Israel made to God, the firstfruits and the firstling livestock, “all the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine,” he said of this promise, “It is a covenant of salt forever.” In the Roman church baptism, the priest once placed salt in the infant’s mouth.

  I salt my breakfast eggs. All day long I feel created. I can see the blown dust on the skin on the back of my hand, the tiny trapezoids of chipped clay, moistened and breathed alive. There are some created sheep in the pasture below me, sheep set down here precisely, just touching their blue shadows hoof to hoof on the grass. Created gulls pock the air, rip great curved seams in the settled air. I greet my created meal, amazed.

  I have been drawing a key to the islands I see from my window. Everyone told me a different set of names for them, until one day a sailor came and named them all with such authority that I believed him. So I penciled an outline of the horizon on a sheet of paper and began labeling the lobes: Skipjack, Sucia, Saturna, Salt Spring, Bare Island . . .

  Today, November 18 and no wind; today a veil of air has lifted I didn’t know was there. Behind the blue translucence of Salt Spring Island I see a new island, a new wrinkle, the deepening of wonder. I have no way of learning this new island’s name. Still, I bring the labeled map to the table and pencil in a new line. Call that: Unknown Island North; Water-Statue; Sky-Ruck; Newborn and Salted; Waiting for Sailor.

  Henry Miller relates that Knut Hamsun once said, in response to a questionnaire, that he wrote to kill time. This is funny in a number of ways. In a number of ways I kill myself laughing, looking out at islands. Startled, the yellow cat on the floor stares over her shoulder. She has carried in a wren, I suddenly see, a wren she has killed, whose dead wings point askew on the circular rug. It is time. Out with you both. I’m busy laughing, to kill time. I shoo the cat from the door, turn the wren over in my palm, and drop it from the porch, down to the winter-killed hair grass and sedge, where the cat may find it if she will, or crows, or beetles, or rain.

  When I next look up from my coffee, there is a ruckus on the porch. The cat has dragged in a god, scorched. He is alive. I run outside. Save for his wings, he is a perfect, very small man. He is fair, thin-skinned in the cat’s mouth, and kicking. His hair is on fire and stinks; his wingtips are blacked and seared. From the two soft flaps of the cat’s tiger muzzle his body jerks, naked. One of his miniature hands pushes hard at her nose. He waves his thigh; he beats her face and the air with his smoking wings. I cannot breathe. I run at the cat to scare her; she drops him, casting me an evil look, and runs from the porch.

  The god lies gasping and perfect. He is no longer than my face. Quickly I snuff the smoldering fire in his yellow hair with a finger and thumb. In so doing I accidentally touch his skull, brush again his hot skull, which is the size of a hazelnut, as the saying goes, warm-skinned and alive.

  He rolls his colorless eyes toward mine; his long wings catch strength from the sun, and heave.

  Later I am walking in the day’s last light. The god rides barefoot on my shoulder, astride it, tugging on loops of my hair. He is whistling at my ear; he is blowing a huge tune in my ear, a myth about November. He is heaping a hot hurricane into my ear, into my hair, an ignorant ditty calling things real, calling islands out of the sea, calling solid moss from curling rock, and ducks down the sky for the winter.

  I see it! I see it all! Two islands, twelve islands, worlds, gather substance, gather the blue contours of time, and array themselves down distance, mute and hard.

  I seem to see a road; I seem to be on a road, walking. I seem to walk on a blacktop road that runs over a hill. The hill creates itself, a powerful suggestion. It creates itself, thickening with apparently solid earth and waving plants, with houses and browsing cattle, unrolling wherever my eyes go, as though my focus were a brush painting in a world. I cannot escape the illusion. The colorful thought persists, this world, a dream forced into my ear and sent round my body on ropes of blood. If I throw my eyes past the rim of the hill to see the real stars, were they? Something with wings? I elaborate the illusion instead; I rough in a middle ground. I stitch the transparent curtain solid with phantom mountains, with thick clouds gliding just so over their shadows on green water, with blank impenetrable sky. The dream fills in, like wind widening over a bay. Quickly I look to the fat dream’s rim for a glimpse of that old deep . . . and, just as quickly, the blue slaps shut, the colors wrap everything out. There is not a chink. The sky is gagging on trees. I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose hips, apples, and thorn. I seem to be on a road walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone.

  Time is enough, more than enough, and matter multiple and given. The god of today is a child, a baby new and filling the house, remarkable here in the flesh. He is day. He thrives in a cup of wind, landlocked and thrashing. He unrolls, revealing his shape an edge at a time, a smatter of content, foot first: a word, a friend for coffee, a windshift, the shingling or coincidence of ideas. Today, November 18 and no wind, is clear. Terry Wean—who fishes, and takes my poetry course—could see Mount Rainier. He hauls his reef net gear from the bay; we talk on its deck while he hammers shrunken knots. The Moores for dinner. In bed, I call to me my sad cat, and read on. Like a rug or wrap rolling unformed up a loom, the day discovers itself, like the poem.

  The god of today is rampant and drenched. His arms spread, bearing moist pastures; his fingers spread, fingering the shore. He is time’s live skin; he burgeons up from day like any tree. His legs spread crossing the heavens, flicking hugely, and flashing and arcing around the earth toward night.

  This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant. It fizzes up in trees, trees heaving up streams of salt to their leaves. This is the one air, bitten by grackles; time is alone and in and out of mind. The god of today is a boy, pagan and fernfoot. His power is enthusiasm; his innocence is mystery. He sockets into everything that is, and that right holy. Loud as music, filling the grasses and skies, his day spreads rising at home in the hundred senses. He rises, new and surrounding. He is everything that is, wholly here and emptied—flung, and flowing, sowing, unseen, and flown.

  AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

  WAKING UP

  CHILDREN TEN YEARS OLD WAKE UP and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills; they know the neighborhood, they can read and write English; they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

  I woke up in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and then forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals, that is, until the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and guessed with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

  Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: Precisely, toe hi
ts toe. The tern folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast.

  Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as the diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

  AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

  SKIN

  OUR PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS, and all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, their limp, coarse skin.

  We children had, for instance, proper hands; our fluid, pliant fingers joined their skin. Adults had misshapen, knuckly hands loose in their skin like bones in bags; it was a wonder they could open jars. They were loose in their skins all over, except at the wrists and ankles, like rabbits.

  We were whole; we were pleasing to ourselves. Our crystalline eyes shone from firm, smooth sockets; we spoke in pure, piping voices through dark, tidy lips. Adults were coming apart, but they neither noticed nor minded. My revulsion was rude, so I hid it. Besides, we could never rise to the absolute figural splendor they alone could on occasion achieve. Our beauty was a mere absence of decrepitude; their beauty, when they had it, was not passive but earned; it was grandeur; it was a party to power, and to artifice, even, and to knowledge. Our beauty was, in the long run, merely elfin. We could not, finally, discount the fact that in some sense they owned us, as they owned the world.

  Mother let me play with one of her hands. She laid it flat on a living-room end table beside her chair. I picked up a transverse pinch of skin over the knuckle of her index finger and let it drop. The pinch didn’t snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge. I poked it; it slid over intact. I left it there as an experiment and shifted to another finger. Mother was reading Time magazine.

  Carefully, lifting it by the tip, I raised her middle finger an inch and released it. It snapped back to the tabletop. Her insides, at least, were alive. I tried all the fingers. They all worked. Some I could lift higher than others.

  “That’s getting boring.”

  “Sorry, Mama.”

  I refashioned the ridge on her index-finger knuckle; I made the ridge as long as I could, using both my hands. Moving quickly, I made parallel ridges on her other fingers—a real mountain chain, the Alleghenies; Indians crept along just below the ridgetops, eyeing the frozen lakes below them through the trees.

  Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit in the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

  I loved this thought, and repeated it for myself often. I don’t know where I got it; my parents cited Adam and Eve only in jokes. Someday, with the aid of a mirror, I would count the trapezoids and learn precisely how many dust specks Adam comprised—one single handful God wetted, shaped, and blew into, then set firmly into motion and left to wander about in the fabulous garden, bewildered.

  The skin on my mother’s face was smooth, fair, and tender; it took impressions readily. She napped on her side on the couch, her face skin pooled on the low side; it piled up in the low corner of her deep-set eyes and drew down her lips and cheeks. How flexible was it? I pushed at a puddle of it by her nose.

  She stirred and opened her eyes. I jumped back.

  She reminded me not to touch her face while she was sleeping. Anybody’s face.

  When she sat up, her cheek and brow bone bore a deep red gash, the mark of a cushion’s welting. It was textured inside precisely with the upholstery’s weave and brocade.

  Another day, after a similar nap, I spoke up about this gash. I told her she had a mark on her face where she’d been sleeping.

  “Do I?” she said; she ran her fingers through her hair. Her hair was short, blond, and wavy. She wore it swept back from her high, curved forehead. The skin on her forehead was both tight and soft. It would only barely shift when I tried to move it.

  She went to the kitchen. The hideous mark on her face did not interest her.

  “It’ll go away,” I said.

  “What?” she called.

  I noticed the hair on my father’s arms and legs; each hair sprang from a dark dot on his skin. I lifted a hair and studied the puckered tepee of skin it pulled with it. Those hairs were in there tight. The greater the strain I put on the hair, the more puckered the tepee became, and shrunken within, concave. I could point it every which way.

  “Ouch! Enough of that.”

  “Sorry, Daddy.”

  At the beach I felt my parents’ shinbones. The bones were flat and curved, like the slats in a venetian blind. The long edges were sharp as swords. But they had unexplained and, I thought, possibly diseased irregularities: nicks, bumps, small hard balls, shallow ridges, and soft spots. I was lying between my parents on an enormous towel through which I could feel the hot sand.

  Loose under their shinbones hung the relaxed flesh of their calves; you could push these and swing them like a baby in a sling. Their heels were dry and hard, sharp at the curved edge. The bottoms of their toes had flattened, holding the imprint of life’s smooth floors even when they were lying down. I would not let this happen to me. Under certain conditions, the long bones of their feet showed under their skin. The bones rose up in skeletal rays on the slopes of their insteps, long and miserable and thin. This terrible sight they ignored also.

  In fact, they were young. Mother was twenty-two when I was born, and Father twenty-nine; both appeared to other adults much younger than they were. They were a handsome couple. I felt it overwhelmingly when they dressed for occasions. I never lost a wondering awe at the transformation of an everyday, tender, nap-creased mother into an exalted and dazzling beauty who chatted with me as she dressed.

  Her blue eyes shone and caught the light, and so did the platinum waves in her hair and the pearls at her ears and throat. She was wearing a black dress. The smooth skin on her breastbone rent my heart, it was so familiar and beloved; the black silk bodice and the simple necklace set off its human fineness. Mother was perhaps a bit vain of her long and perfect legs, but not too vain for me; despite her excited pleasure, she did not share my view of her beauty.

  “Look at your father,” she said. We were all in the dressing room. I found him in one of the long mirrors, where he waggled his outthrust chin over the last push of his tie knot. For me he made his big ears jiggle on his skull. It was a wonder he could ever hear anything; his head was loose inside him.

  Father’s enormousness was an everyday, stunning fact; he was taller than everyone else. He was neither thin nor stout; his torso was supple, his long legs nimble. Before the dressing-room mirror he produced an anticipatory soft-shoe, and checked to see that his cuffs stayed down.

  And then they were off. I hoped they knocked ’em dead; I hoped their friends saw how witty they were, and how splendid.

  Their parties at home did not seem very entertaining, although they laughed loudly and often fetched the one-man percussion band from the basement, or an old trumpet, or a snare drum. We children could have shown them how to have a better time. Kick the Can, for instance, never palled. A private game called Spider Cow, played by the Spencer children, also had possibilities: The spider cow hid and flung a wet washcloth at whoever found it, and erupted from hiding and chased him running all over the house.

  But implicitly and emphatically, my parents and their friends were not interested. They never ran. They did not choose to run. It went with being old, apparently, and having their skin half off.

  AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

  BEING CHASED

  SOME BOYS TAUGHT ME TO PLAY FOOTBALL. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs. Either you brought him
down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: You would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or, worse, you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees—if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly—then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could equal it.

  Boys welcomed me at baseball, too, for I had, through enthusiastic practice, what was weirdly known as a boy’s arm. In winter, in the snow, there was neither baseball nor football, so the boys and I threw snowballs at passing cars. I got in trouble throwing snowballs, and have seldom been happier since.

  One weekday morning after Christmas, six inches of new snow had just fallen. We were standing up to our boot tops in snow on a front yard on well-trafficked Reynolds Street, waiting for cars. The cars traveled Reynolds Street slowly and evenly; they were cream puffs, targets all but wrapped in red ribbons. We couldn’t miss.

  I was seven; the boys were eight, nine, and ten. The oldest two Fahey boys were there—Mikey and Peter—polite blond boys who lived near me on Lloyd Street, and who already had four brothers and sisters. My parents approved of Mikey and Peter Fahey. Chickie McBride was there, a tough kid, and Billy Paul and Mackie Kean, too, from across Reynolds, where the boys grew up dark and furious, grew up skinny, knowing, and skilled. We had all drifted from our houses that morning looking for action, and had found it here on Reynolds Street.