The Living by Annie Dillard

Author:Annie Dillard
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

Now this morning, standing chilled by the sink, Clare saw from her set frown that June had been brooding already, and wanted to chew over things some more. It was hard to see her expression when she bent her head, because her full length reached only to his middle ribs; he saw the untidy curved parting of her brown hair. June put out her hand as if to take his arm, and he allowed her to lead him back outside on the windy porch.

“My dear,” she said, “look. You know the sheriff, don’t you? He could assign a deputy or two to protect you. This is a law-abiding, civilized little town.” Clare winced. She always called Whatcom “little.” It was not Baltimore, that he knew; it was in fact a darn sight more civilized, as far as he could make out from magazine stories about that city’s blood tubs, bludgets, and drummers, but June had grown up there in a kind of castle, without taking much in.

The two leaned on the cold porch rail, facing out. They could see beneath them the lower hill with its bare houses, the growing business district, and the dull sea spreading beyond it under thick skies. The railroad trestle curved across the bay in a pencil line from south to north, and three straight wharves met it. In the harbor two steamers rode at anchor, and the Doris Burn was tied at the main wharf. Warehouses and coal bunkers stood on or near every wharf, and new lines of driven piles trailed into the water. A breakwater enclosed a wharf of coal barges and the dozen or so schooners and sloops that worked all winter. This was his town, and in his way Clare had helped build it, as he had helped break its wilderness as a boy. Out on the sea, near and far, were blue, forested islands, and the big ones bulged with mountains. Clare and June looked out, and their eyes roamed the islands unseeing, while they discussed protection under the law.

The rule of law thinned and petered out south of town, they knew. Loners lived there, some of them vicious—horse thieves, it may be, or swindlers, old buffalo hunters who indulged in every vice, bank sneaks and bilks. Down at Deception Pass, prisoners worked the rock quarry; they lived in convict camps at Oyster Creek ravine. Some of those boys would shoot anything that glittered. In the mill towns, police rounded up vagrants into chain gangs, who did the city’s work; no one remarked on a murder a month. On Chuckanut Ridge, south of town, two masked men robbed trains. An old Indian fighter shot a three-card monte dealer in the hobo jungle, for cheating. The “True Love” bandit had come through; on a railroad bridge he shot two blanket stiffs with his characteristic split bullets. He had the letters TRUE LOVE tattooed on the backs of his fingers of both hands, one capital letter to a finger; he killed

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