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holi, huqui, huqui, to Mayans the sound of grinding corn on
a metate. The words would console him for losing Anasazi, a
t he ma y t r e e s 55
word he had just learned from the Globe. Some year, some-
how, he would work into some poem rini, rini, manju, manju,
the sound of bullock-cart axle in Hindi.
So he added his playful bits to the world perceived. How
much better to heal and prevent disease; feed and inoculate
and teach kids; provide sturdy breeds of animals and seeds!
But poetry seemed to be his task, and the long poem his form
as it had been Edwin Arlington Robinson s. Quarterlies and
reviews, like some anthologies, printed his short lyrics. He
endorsed Edwin Arlington Robinson s view that anthologies
preserve poems by pickling their corpses. Always omitting
Robinson s real, long work that future readers would never
know, anthologists forever reprinted Richard Cory who
went out and put a bullet through his head, and no wonder.
Petie at eleven surfcast the backshore for bluefish crash-
ing bait, and in the fall for stripers. He freed a wing-hooked
cormorant that slashed his throat. His mother fed his many
friends ship s biscuit and honey. They overturned outhouses
on Halloween. He met the fleet every night. He jigged squid
by lantern light and leaned on pilings on piers. He had an old
dory and often kept it running, afloat, or both.
His fondness for humans did not extend to girls, who were
less interesting than frogs, and noisier. Girls had no skills but
clustering and jacks a ball game they played sitting down.
Girls had no higher wish than to get old enough to wear
makeup. He owned rocks he respected more. From afar, very
far, he studied one high-school girl.
56 Annie Dillard
Winter in calm air Pilgrim Lake froze. When it froze
without snowing, everyone skated. One night Lou and May-
tree skated arm-in-arm on black ice in half a gale. The lake
lay in the expanse between dunes and highway. Others from
town brought wood for a bonfire from which sparks joined
stars. The two warmed each other on an iced marsh-grass
hummock by the fire. They watched Petie dash among his
friends. Now she saw bigger boys at one end of the lake jump-
ing barrels. She watched Petie join them. Not tall, he was
sturdy. When he jumped a laid-down barrel and skated away,
the boys added another barrel. He cleared those two side-by-
side, so they added another. Petie had been a marvel all along.
By the time the boys quit, each had smashed up gloriously at
least twice. When they landed, they slid on ice until stopped
by the foot of a dune. These were the boys she used to watch
Maytree coach at football.
Lou turned to Maytree and saw his firelit pupils deepen to
hers. He was letting her in, as always, and holding her there.
His skin glowed; she slipped from a mitten to warm his cold
cheek with her palm. For three days it had blown 30 knots
from the west. He put his arm around her, and she leaned her
face near his face so she could hear him in wind. She tilted
and felt his jaw move before he kissed her forehead.
. . . If I don t talk about your hair, your lips, your eyes,
still your face that I keep inside my soul,
the sound of your voice that I keep inside my brain,
the days of September rising in my dreams,
t he ma y t r e e s 57
give shape and color to my words, my sentences,
whatever theme I touch, whatever thought I utter.
He pressed her close to say part of the poem in her ear. She
touched her forehead to his. How absurd that brains could
not embrace, although she favored the present arrangement.
They walked all the way home. She longed for the life
she already possessed, a life large as clouds . Mightily, as she
had these three days, she opposed the wind s push. Her coat
pressed her back; cold blew through her wool slacks. All at
once, as they walked still in the open, the wind died. Someone
shut a valve? Her stance nearly toppled her; he caught her. Her
ears pricked. The silence unnerved her. The air s emptiness felt
like Maytree beside her had died. They looked at each other.
I feel like I ve lost consciousness, he said, hoarse. He was
in his early forties. His face was open. He seemed not to have
noticed that consciousness in him was a wind.
The next morning, as Maytree s skull pinched off ar-
terial flow to her arm, she told him she grew talkative at
such times that when her mother left for New York, she
had asked her how she could leave Provincetown. What do
you like better in New York? You ll laugh, her mother said.
No I won t. All right: It s the light. Lou had laughed. She
loved the silver light in New York canyons too.
And where was Lou s father? No one knew. In Marblehead,
when she was a tall and bookish twelve her mother asked her
one night to set the table for two. Her father often missed din-
ner. She and her mother sat to chilled consommé madrilène,
58 Annie Dillard
roast potatoes, and lamb. Beyond the dining room windows,
Marblehead harbor grayed. The sea f loated a red oval: a cloud
reflecting the sun now down. Her lovely mother s composure
broke. She covered her face and left. Lou ate in silence and
eyed the cold water. The next day her father missed breakfast.
At middle school a day later her friend Phoebe told her,
You didn t know? that her father had left town with her
eponymous aunt Lou, her mother s sister. Of her tall father
she retained several small memories and one big one. He
loved her; they loved each other. She stood behind his chair
and smelled his hair. She never saw him again, or heard from
him. Someone said he married her aunt Lou and was spend-
ing the summer in Rough and Ready, California. Her moth-
er s face hardened and stuck. She never spoke of the man. Lou
knew then that her mother was tallying her father s faults and
perfidies. She did not know then that polishing this grudge
would be her mother s lone project for the balance of her life.
Lou was in college when her mother moved to the West Vil-
lage and gave her the house on Cape Cod Bay.
Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her prop-
osition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of
the man she loves. She saw a snapshot of boy Maytree in cap
and knickers dwarfed by his cross-eyed father on a wharf. In
the prints, Maytree s cap s shadow blacked most of his face.
Here again he crouched on the beach, as at a starting block,
between his hairy mother and his visibly half-dead grand-
mother, in a wind harsh with that present s brine. In those
t he ma y t r e e s 59
prints she saw unease in the boy, as if he had been scanning
the offing for the man.
No, it was she who sought for the man in the child. She
could not find him, so the boy seemed to her lost in a deafen-
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