My anger ebbed. I noticed that. After recovering the new-found scrap. The things I’d feared most—that I deserved to be punished, that I was to blame for losing not only my sister but my mother, too, that my being cast out alone was my due—all this turned out to be untrue.
Perhaps it was thanks to the newfound scrap that I began noticing how alone I’d always been. At the Captain’s, where people came and went without anyone’s knowing their story. At the home of my earliest childhood, where my mother and I were isolated from the main house and I’d been isolated even from her mother tongue.
At the study house it was different. The same people came back every day, called one another by name, shared their stories. At least, this seemed to be what they did when they sat around those big tables together in the room with all the books. Shy about my inability to read, I hadn’t ventured close. But each day I grew more curious.
One afternoon I helped Max muck out the stalls, and when we finished, when we’d put back the wheelbarrow and lined the brooms and shovels back against the wall, we came out of the stable and the air had a great mellowness and the sky was ridiculously blue.
“Let’s look for morels,” he said, and I followed him into the woods.
We crunched through old dead leaves. They gave off a complicated perfume, a disintegrating sweetness, which made me think of Ottla’s person who’d smelled apple rot. Max squatted to inspect around the base of certain trunks. We found some fungi and a patch of ramps, whose leaves he cut from the bulbs with a pocketknife. No morels. “Not yet,” he said.
We kept going, climbed to the peak of the little hill that rose behind the study house, from which we could see sheep at pasture in neighboring fields, and land dipping away across the valley like quilt squares, some pale and others nearly black from being freshly plowed, their borders stitched by stone wall or hedgerow, and in the farthest distance the silver-blue band of river I’d seen the day I arrived.
“Max,” I said after a moment—it was still an effort for me to address someone by name, and I felt bold doing so—“what is it you all do, exactly, around those big tables every afternoon, every night?”
“Study.” He was a soft-spoken man.
“But what do you study?”
Simply: “The story.”
“But how could one story be enough, day after day after day?”
He grinned appreciatively, as if I’d made a good joke. “It had better be enough!”
“Why?”
“Because what else is there?”
“But—”
“Come see for yourself.”
“I’m not … I can’t read.”
“It doesn’t matter. Come anyway. Sit with us.” He turned back toward the stretched-out vista that lay beyond the hill, and I saw that although his whiskers were mere floss compared to the Captain’s, their coloring was the same, and the way he stood looking out across the expanse, a mixture of peace and longing on his face, was like the Captain, too.
A few hours later, when people filled the big room, I helped carry around popcorn and tea. Going from table to table, I looked over their shoulders at their splayed books. I studied them in the manner I could, noticing shapes and patterns, noting how the pages were laid out like mazes, with a box of words in the center and columns of various sizes and shapes printed around it on all sides. The spaces between the writing formed crooked pathways of white.
Back in the kitchen, I asked Dora why the books looked like that, and she explained. “The middle bit’s the old story, and the other bits are different views on what it means—stories about the story—that got added through the ages.”
She was stirring soup. Viv and Max were out in the big room, at a long table with a lively band of other young people, the pages and faces all flickering in the light of many fat candles. Dora herself had studied earlier, as was her custom, gathering with a few of the older folks at a corner table lit by the last of the day’s sun.
I checked on the kitten, nestled on the feather bed on the platform above the stove. She remained as Dora had said, no better and no worse. I danced my fingers where she could see them, but although one ear pricked forward, she did not gather herself to pounce. Giving up, I stroked her instead. “So that’s what you all argue about?”
This much I understood: “Studying” meant arguing. They were always having hearty disagreements. Even amid joyful spurts of laughter, even amid moments of silent concentration, what propelled the conversations was difference.
“Day after day, night after night, you just argue about the same thing?”
“It’s our story,” said Dora. “What else should we argue about?”
“But why argue at all?”
She made a face. “Would you have us all think the exact same things?”
“Well—yes.”
“How lonely that would be.”
Lonely! That seemed backward to me.
She crumbled a handful of dried herbs into the pot.
I struggled to understand. “What about the other books, the ones on all the shelves?”
“They’re part of the old story. Every one of them’s filled with more views.”
“So you start with the old story in the middle of the page, then go to the blocks of writing around it, and then to the books on the shelves, which are also somehow part of it … but how can one story be that big?”
“Oh, it’s bigger than that,” said Dora. “You’re leaving out the unwritten parts, the word-of-mouth parts that passed down by our parents’ telling. And our parents’ parents, and so on.”
I seemed to have wandered into a hedge maze that kept adding pathways by the moment.
“How can anyone know all of it?”
“No one can. No one ever could. Right now, this very moment, more of the story’s being born out of people’s mouths.” With her head she indicated the other room. “And even if a person could somehow gather all that’s being said every moment, they still couldn’t know the rest—the parts our children will add, and our children’s children.”
“Then how can you ever know who’s right?”
“Right?”
“When you study together, when you argue about the different views every night. How do you decide who’s right?”
“But there is no right.” Dora stepped back from the pot. She looked at me as if I were speaking gibberish. She said, “Ani, my dear. It’s all right.” Her wooden spoon dripped soup on the floor. “It all is.”