Raina had never kept count of all the men she had slept with, but at sixteen she said a safe guess would be something like a thousand: a thousand men, handsome and ugly, young and old, skinny and fat, rough and gentle, by the side of the road, in the school at night, in the fields, by the river, in the gray sand and the brambles, the sweetness of berries and all the downy new grass crushed beneath them, a man’s shirt soaked through with juice—thimbleberry, stone berry, whitebark and red—and somewhere in the middle all that sweetness the lost scent of some stolen childhood, some sounds, some motions, the man grunting, skin torn, body cold, but smoothing, roughly, Raina’s hair against her neck, and she looking up and embracing him gently, the sky above her sliced by thorns, and she with her own crown, the leader of the child crusade, the virgin mother of the lost men of the world, the last living saint—I knew all that. I knew all that, had always known it; knew, the way Jennie and Anna and Rabbit knew that Raina Dautermann slept with their boyfriends and their fathers and their brothers and any other many that passed through town, that Raina was, to all those men, a kind of saint. And still I managed to know all that without seeing her as someone who could fall in love, as hard in love, as perfectly, stupidly, sweetly in love as the simplest girl in town. I knew it all and did not know the simplest thing about it, and it seems amazing to me, amazing that I did not know the thing that was as simple to understand as the need for it was simple in the first place: she was a saint because she loved, because she loved, because she loved—how can you be a saint otherwise? She loved all her men, the ugly ones, the cruel ones, the lost ones, the old ones, the fat ones, the young ones, the handsome ones; she loved them as much as a woman loves her husband, as a mother loves her son, as much as any shepherd must love his flock, and if any man who met her on the road, any brother, any father, any man old or young had asked her to stay with him forever, she would have. She would have stayed with any of them, but in all the time she lived in Snowden Bobby was the first one to ask, Bobby the first one to see her not as the last living saint but as a girl who loved him and would do anything for him and nothing more—and though I think back at times on how stupid I was, how many simple thing I did not know, it is a comfort to remember there was someone in the world who knew even less than me. In any high school science class you will learn that men, though they can do almost anything—write poems and symphonies, paint pictures, tame lions, sail across the widest oceans, and map the craters of the moon—no man can do something as basic, as perfectly elementary, as growing a single leaf or blade of grass, of producing a praying mantis, an Osage orange, a handful of clay, a piece of stone, a cold. It is true of everyone. It was true of my father, of all the men I have loved, of all the men I have known, and all the women; of the shy ones, the sweet ones, the stupid ones, the mean ones, the beautiful ones, the ugly ones, the weak ones, the strong ones, the faithful ones, the smart ones. It is true of me. It was not true of Raina: while the rest of the world read and wrote and built and learned and ate and ran and drew and sang and thought and did their best, as people here on earth, to make one thing that was great enough to disguise the fact that it was only human, Raina loved, loved, loved, like grass grew and rain fell and rivers ran and ice thawed and coltfoots opened to the sun in spring. She loved like no one else there was, and I knew it could not be a thing that came from her, from that small body, the girl who was only a girl, in the end, a pretty girl, a sweet girl, a hard girl, but a girl: it was not hers. It went from her to everyone she met and she gave it away and gave it away and never asked for a single thing in return.
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timeasmymeasure
finally getting back on the wagon after a week of midterms
Date: 2008-11-09 06:49 am (UTC)I knew it all and did not know the simplest thing about it, and it seems amazing to me, amazing that I did not know the thing that was as simple to understand as the need for it was simple in the first place: she was a saint because she loved, because she loved, because she loved—how can you be a saint otherwise? She loved all her men, the ugly ones, the cruel ones, the lost ones, the old ones, the fat ones, the young ones, the handsome ones; she loved them as much as a woman loves her husband, as a mother loves her son, as much as any shepherd must love his flock, and if any man who met her on the road, any brother, any father, any man old or young had asked her to stay with him forever, she would have. She would have stayed with any of them, but in all the time she lived in Snowden Bobby was the first one to ask, Bobby the first one to see her not as the last living saint but as a girl who loved him and would do anything for him and nothing more—and though I think back at times on how stupid I was, how many simple thing I did not know, it is a comfort to remember there was someone in the world who knew even less than me.
In any high school science class you will learn that men, though they can do almost anything—write poems and symphonies, paint pictures, tame lions, sail across the widest oceans, and map the craters of the moon—no man can do something as basic, as perfectly elementary, as growing a single leaf or blade of grass, of producing a praying mantis, an Osage orange, a handful of clay, a piece of stone, a cold. It is true of everyone. It was true of my father, of all the men I have loved, of all the men I have known, and all the women; of the shy ones, the sweet ones, the stupid ones, the mean ones, the beautiful ones, the ugly ones, the weak ones, the strong ones, the faithful ones, the smart ones. It is true of me. It was not true of Raina: while the rest of the world read and wrote and built and learned and ate and ran and drew and sang and thought and did their best, as people here on earth, to make one thing that was great enough to disguise the fact that it was only human, Raina loved, loved, loved, like grass grew and rain fell and rivers ran and ice thawed and coltfoots opened to the sun in spring. She loved like no one else there was, and I knew it could not be a thing that came from her, from that small body, the girl who was only a girl, in the end, a pretty girl, a sweet girl, a hard girl, but a girl: it was not hers. It went from her to everyone she met and she gave it away and gave it away and never asked for a single thing in return.