The Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard
When the bank failed, Clare dreaded June’s contempt. Ordinarily he would have quailed at the worse possibility that she might hide her contempt, thereby demonstrating that she felt her very life to be a calamity entire—he would have quailed, that is, except that he could barely fix his mind on any aspect of the loss. He chided himself: What was a man’s duty but to provide for his family? What species of scoundrel would lose all his wife’s money? He felt himself, however, more substantial than before. The Panic was showing all Whatcom what people could live without. No one would knock on the Fishburn door at midnight and threaten to take away anything they needed. Clare had never clapped eyes on piles of gold; he had only signed papers, and brought papers for June to sign. He had done nothing more with the money than buy June an organ with it, and imagine buying a boat or two, and a horse, and a carriage. He had prized the money as evidence of his rise. Now he found he rather liked falling; there was some solidity to it. A man knew where he was bound.
These days June was eager to pitch in. Kneeling in her skirt, she wove shingles by alternating thick sides and thin sides so the bundles came out square. The skin on her face was puffed and red. She gave out rather more of her usual ironic brand of affection lately, and never blamed him. “She really is a daisy,” he thought—for those were all the words he found for his increasing sensation of participation, of glory, even, in a world of flux.
Together they would weave up these last shingles and load them in the wagon. Then there was nothing more Clare could do but wait until tomorrow, when he could take them down to the railyard. Now fair-weather clouds were forming overhead. It seemed to Clare that a man in his situation, on such a day, in such a possible world, just ought to go fishing.
Beal Obenchain sat outside his stump house, on a stool. His long feet were bare and white save for streaks of orange callus where his trouser cuffs scraped them; his high-crowned derby eclipsed half his brow. He pulled from his mouth an orange crab leg, which he bit delicately up its length, then upended and sucked. High overhead, fir and cedar needles shredded the sunlight till it was gone.
Earlier that afternoon, Obenchain had rowed out and found a big male Dungeness crab and most of a smaller male in his crab pot. He reset the pot with dogfish skin and carried the crabs by their hind legs up the embankment and into the woods. Now he was eating them. The boiling vat lay on the needled ground beside him. From time to time he shook the broken shells from the tops of his feet.
It had not worked with Clare Fishburn, whose life he now knew. “You are going to die,” he had said, and this simple townsman believed him. He seemed, however, singularly unaffected by it. In the first months, Obenchain knew, Fishburn avoided the south side of town and the deep timber. He stayed out of the saloon and the hotel bar all winter and spring, and hauled his bed away from the upstairs window. Beal had scared him out of his own garden once. He wore a sidearm outside. Obenchain even knew that the man’s wife was badgering him to move.
He knew also that, despite these alarms, the man was not yet ontologically dead. He persisted in thinking his own thoughts, and Obenchain was uncertain what those thoughts might be. A boyish, unchastened stupidity had left Fishburn’s face—that was good. The face, however, had not merely flinched or emptied. When he walked or bicycled in town, he no longer searched the streets and glanced behind him, as he had during the winter. His gait wakened, and he looked sharp, but not strictly in fear. It was no longer a pleasure for Obenchain to surprise Fishburn in the street; the subject failed to react. Now Obenchain hated him, when he recalled him.
He rose and bent to a pan of dough on the ground. He punched the dough down, slid the pan over the gray ground to a patch of sunlight that had moved, and sat back.
He had meant to observe and preside over the corruption of a man’s spirit. He had meant to dramatize to an ordinary man, by the threat of death, the spectacle of his own cowardice. He had meant to reveal to the man his own lifelong ignorance and self-satisfaction, and to display both his helplessness and his insignificance. He had meant to murder Fishburn without leaving a corpse—to own him by possessing his thoughts, to kill him legally, by the power of suggestion. The suggestion had failed. Fishburn was not tormenting himself with uncertainty. Who could live with the certain knowledge that he would die? Only, apparently, the truly stupid. Fishburn’s self-satisfaction had, if anything, apparently increased.
Obenchain had seen Fishburn with his family at a boat launching the evening before. Fishburn was among the men who had hoisted the new hull in the builder’s shed, hauled it down to the beach, and heaved it into the water. Obenchain watched from a log. Fishburn carried himself, following his sharp nose, as if he owned the earth. He looked to Obenchain as though he fancied he had personally built the boat and the beach and the water, all in his little shop. After the launching the town made a picnic on the beach. The man and his wife looked at the water, at the men taking turns rowing the new dory up and down the mild shore; they kindled a fire. Limber but not slack, Fishburn looked as though he owned all the time in the world. He had learned absolutely nothing. His self-deception overpowered any truth. He paid Obenchain no mind. Once he nodded at him and, in what was possibly open mockery, passed the jug to someone else.
Obenchain cracked crab legs in his teeth. There were many things on his mind this June. There was an artist, a painter of shipwrecks, new in town this summer. He was an insignificant personage—what could more properly be termed a “booger”—whom everyone worshiped as a species of god, and who was seeking to destroy Obenchain’s reputation as an intellectual. There was a rich book collector, too, in LaConner, a book collector of delicate sensibility and strikingly youthful appearance, whose fortune insulted Obenchain and whose image appeared in his mind. Finally there was Fishburn, a shrivel of a man, who would not give up the ghost.
He had admired the idea of kicking the struts away from a man one by one, so the false front fell. The spectacle of Fishburn’s decline was meant to be, among other things, a moral display for the town. That the town would likely not notice it dramatized it further. None of this was coming to pass, however. Obenchain had endured a bellyful of Fishburn. Now a new idea was provoking his mind.
What Obenchain considered, crumbling crabs, was this. Although Fishburn was afraid, he was not destroyed, not owned. Likely, fear alone could not deliver a man into his hands, not if it presented a clear challenge. Perhaps uncertainty alone could destroy. Perhaps the Chinaman tied to the wharf had not suffered at all as he waited for the tide to rise and drown him—because he was certain the tide would rise. Perhaps, then, his own weapons were, hitherto, crude. If uncertainty was the last hope of destroying Fishburn, then he would furnish him with more of it.
He would take it all back. He would tell him he was by no means going to kill him. Tell him it was a joke, or an experiment, something finished. Then…what would Fishburn do? Would he be acute enough to reckon the experiment just begun?
Obenchain could say, “What I told you in December was a lie, and now…this is the truth: I am not going to kill you.” Since Fishburn was alive so long after he told him he was going to die, Fishburn had reason to doubt Obenchain, and disbelieve him. He might think Obenchain was an inveterate liar, like one of the Cretans in the epistle to Titus—“always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.” A liar who told you he would not kill you actually meant to kill you in earnest. Fishburn might think Obenchain sometimes lied and sometimes spoke the truth. In these uncertainties, Fishburn could stew. Obenchain was losing interest in him, but he would allow him this last chance to furnish him with diversion.
Obenchain determined, then, to find Clare Fishburn tomorrow, and tell him this new thing. He stood up, and fine sand and triangles of orange shell fell from his pants. He moved the dough pan again. He poured the crab water over the bracken ferns by the door.
Before noon the next day, Mabel Fishburn, her puttylike face sunburned below her eyes, returned from her cousin’s house and was sitting on the front porch,
“Gone fishing,” she said, looking away. People were always trying to get her to look in their faces.
“Where has he gone…fishing?”
Mabel rose and went inside. She returned in a minute, with her stockings pulled up; she sat again on the edge of the porch and said, “On the river.”
“Which river?”
Mabel rolled her eyes at the botheration to which life ceaselessly subjected her. She went inside and returned to stand in the doorway—she had no intention of sitting any longer on the porch—and said, “The Nooksack.”
Clare Fishburn came walking over the Nooksack plain. He was heading home after an afternoon alone on the river. He carried a pole and a knotted sack containing one cleaned two-pound trout. He followed the lazy dirt track that traced the Nooksack down and swept east toward the bay. The river lay low and sleeping. The poured plain lay slow and flat as the river, and the sky lay monumental over the world.
Miles away at the eastern rim of the plain, the snowed mountains lighted their portion of sky. Mount Baker and the other peaks appeared to rise behind the very bank of the river, the plain was so flat. In every other direction the fields gave way directly to light; the farmers’ yellow flax and green pea fields and hayfields curved beyond sight. Clare walked toward the train tracks to town. It was afternoon; overhead the sun was ample. Above the earth rode fifteen or twenty tall clouds. Clare watched the clouds—clouds like rocks you could chip, edged with light, caked in grit. They bulged and piled.
Beside him a dense hedge of berries darkened the lip where the fields met a delta meander. Goldfinches were feeding in the hedges—wild canaries, his mother called them. As Clare moved across the plain, the goldfinches swept before him, burst by burst, then flew behind him after he passed. He flushed flock after flock; they looped down the riverside before him. He was walking home.
He was walking home and remembering a Sunday last spring. In the drizzle after church, children were playing in Clare’s front yard.
Mabel and her cousin Nesta, and two other children, were tying each other to the cottonwood tree. They had found a length of line. Clare watched from the parlor. He had forgotten this piece of information: children tie one another to trees. Children find wild eggs, treasure, and corpses; they make trails, huts, and fires; they hit one another, hold hands, and tie one another to trees. They tied a small boy to the tree, and he cried. They tied Mabel to the tree; her Easter hat fell, and she could not break away.
That day Clare had looked out past the porch and the lilacs. Here is a solid planet, he thought, stocked with mountains and cliffs, where stone banks jut and deeply rooted trees hang on. Among these fixed and enduring features wander the flimsy people. The earth rolls down and the people die; their survivors derive solace from clinging, not to the rocks, not to the cliffs, not to the trees, but to each other. It was striking. Loose people clung in families, holding on for dear life. Grasping at straws! One would think people would beg to be tied to trees.
Mabel stood, dubious in her white ruffled dress, lashed in manila rope to the wet cottonwood trunk. She looked up and saw him in the window. June, old Ada, and the other women were in the kitchen, preparing a big dinner. If the children tied him to the tree, Obenchain could shoot him. How soft-shelled Mabel was, with her bones inside her! She could break, burn, suffocate, puncture, or freeze, this Mabel, for whom everything had been made so smooth. Clare’s mother came bending around the house to the back door in her church finery; the children were calling her. “No,” she said from the doorway, “I am too old.”
Now Clare had walked all day. He saw a marsh hawk riding the air slopes low over the plain. The big clouds brightened; the sunlight shone yellow on their bossy sides. What could be unthinkable? When the river curved north, Clare left its banks and cut westward past pea fields north of town. He flushed the goldfinches, and the goldfinches flew; the sky colored up, and a killdeer ran calling. After two or three miles he saw patches of forest ahead—the uncut railroad right-of-way on the bluff past the trestle—forest, and a forest-broken lighted band of water. After another mile his path joined the railroad track. It entered a strip of timber and burst out on the grade up to the shore.
Clare lowered his hat, looking out at water. White gulls dropped cockles on the roadbed and lumbered down to feed on broken bits. The sun was low. The tide was in; water covered the beach below past the cobbles, where the mud began. Clare shifted his sack and pole, changing arms, and started up the tracks toward the trestle. Looking ahead, he saw Obenchain almost at once.
It looked like Obenchain. The man lounged inert on the point of the bluff where the trestle’s log foundation met its ties. His body pointed out toward the water, and his head lay sideways, resting on naked shoulder and arm, facing down the track toward Clare. It was certainly Obenchain, from his size and his hat. His chest and arms were bare. Clare could not see if he had a gun. Clare had his Lightning; he had also a fish knife. Unless Clare could shoot him first, and if Obenchain had no gun, he would simply throw Clare from the trestle. His back would break, or his legs, and he would drown. He sifted his options without emotion. He would not shoot Obenchain in cold blood, as if for lounging on the trestle. If the two tangled, could he use his knife? Should he open it now? He decided he should not open his knife, or uncover his revolver. There was no use asking for trouble. It always came down to a man’s size. Obenchain could point any weapon Clare held in any direction Obenchain preferred. He would, slightly, rather drown in cold water than get stuck by his own knife or shot.
There was no one else near; no farm boys bringing in the cows, no crewmen inspecting track, no men in boats on the water. Obenchain alone was in sight, and Clare was in sight of Obenchain and the yellow clouds. Obenchain looked for all the world as if he was expecting Clare and waiting for him.
So Clare carried on up the tracks toward Obenchain. Obenchain raised his head from his arm; he made no move to stand. Clare came pacing the roadbed cinders toward Obenchain because Obenchain sat in his path.
He walked from the long habit of walking, as if he were opening the air as a canoe bow opens the river. He saw himself being opened as if Obenchain were a table saw. He was a clod of dirt that the light splits.
Obenchain stood and stopped him, his face thickened under his hat.
“I am not…going to kill you,” Obenchain said. “You are not…going to die.” Clare looked out over the trestle toward town.
Obenchain offered a view he had to reject. Of course he was going to die. He walked around the man. He saw Obenchain’s head turn as he passed; he made no move to follow. The tide on the bay was slack at the flood. There was a plank walkway on the trestle by the rails. Clare moved onto the walkway, nodding. The trestle quit the shore, and Clare stepped out over the bay and the strait in a socket of light. Sky pooled under his shoulders and arched beneath his feet. Time rolled back and bore him; he was porous as bones.
“No,” he said to Obenchain—but Obenchain was already far behind him on the bluff, his head swaying up like a blind man’s. No, indeed. He was not willing to lose this life. He would return home and fry the trout. He had shingles to split, too, here on top. He saw the sun drenching the blue westward islands and battering a path down the water. He saw the town before him to the south, where the trestle lighted down. Then, far on the Nooksack plain to the east, he saw a man walking. The distant figure was turning pea rows under in perfect silence. He held and guided the plow a horse drew. His feet trod his figure’s long blue shadow, and the plow cut its long blue shadow in the ground. The man turned back as if to look along the furrow, to check its straightness. Clare saw again on the plain farther north another man, walking behind a horse and turning the green ground under. Then before him on the trestle over
The earth was plowing the men under, and the horses under, and the plows. No generation sees it happen, and the broken new fields grow up forgetting. Clare was burrowing in light upstream. All the living were breasting into the crest of the present together. All men and women and children ran spread in a long line, holding aloft a ribbon or banner; they ran up a field as wide as earth, opening time like a path in the grass, and he was borne along with them. No, he said, peeling the light back, walking in the sky toward home; no.
The trestle lit down in town above the wharves. Clare paused to look back down the beach. The water’s face showed a flaw of wind rake over it like fingers; the water’s surface pulled the near blue islands down in reflections that boats cut in streaks. His eye followed the long curve of stones and logs on the bay. He heard a glad shout.
There were some Lummi Indian men on the beach below. He watched one man heave a plank of driftwood high over the water, crying a cry. The other three, whose laughing he could faintly hear, shied cobbles at the plank as it fell. Everything splashed into the water. Clare stepped onto the beach and picked up a few stones, thinking to join the men, but he remembered the trout, so he turned and headed up the five steep blocks to Lambert Street.