Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon

Author:Dan Chaon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307415264
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

SURE I WILL

Here in the heart of the country, the trees are all in lines and patterns. There were no trees here before the pioneers came, I’m told, and when the cottonwoods and elms and spruce were finally brought in, they were planted so they conformed to the edge of a road or a field; they were organized into regiments to protect houses from the sun, or land from erosion. It seems to me that people must have forgotten how trees grew in forests, or even that trees were a natural phenomenon, not something they could erect like sod houses or barbed-wire fences. They were hypnotized by the flatness of the landscape, by the unyielding conformity of everything in their lives.

My paternal grandmother’s house was a perfectly symmetrical place, set in the middle of miles of wheatfields and lined on either side with elms. When I was small, there had been a tire swing in one of the trees. One day, while I was playing on it, the rope had broken and I dropped to the ground and got a concussion. My grandmother never put the swing back up, but on one of the highest branches, the knotted rope that held the tire remained. Years later, when I came to live with my grandmother, I found the rope there, with the tree trying to grow over it. The rope had cut deeply into a branch, and in the summer the tree would bleed brown sour-smelling juice from the place where the rope wounded it.

My grandmother had been on a slow, erratic decline for some months when my parents suggested she go to a rest home. They hated the unpredictability of it. They wouldn’t hear of her staying in that big house all alone, where anything might happen. But my grandmother didn’t want to leave. The compromise was that I would go stay with her.

It was the summer after I’d graduated from high school, and my parents, I think, were looking for ways to get me out of the house. They were happy people, and had found it hard to understand me when, in the months following commencement, I’d become distant, introverted; I was easily obsessed. For a while, I’d been interested in genealogy. I spent a full week poring over family trees, old Bibles, obituaries. At one point, I’d written down the ages at which all my relatives for the last four or five generations had died, and averaged them; from that, I was able to predict that I would be most likely to die sometime in March 2050. I’d also thought for a while that I might like to be a doctor, so I went to the library to check out medical books.

In one of the books, it showed a cadaver that students were dissecting. I hadn’t been able to resist turning back, again and again, to stare at it. It was an old woman, but there was something inhuman about her: the claylike, immobile face; the yellow-gray flaps of skin pulled back; the uterus; the womb divided.

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