Saturday, August 29, 2009

Page 19, Paragraph 8; Page 20, Paragraphs 1 and 2; Note

Page 19, Paragraph 8:

"Eat this," she says, and I say nothing - I just look. Now she puts the bowl to my mouth, so that liquid from it flows warmly onto my chin, onto my tongue, and it's milk, and it's good. I drink, and at the same time look at her above the bowl's edge. "How," she says, "did you come here?" Her speech is strange, with words in a different order, but I can understand what she says.* My mouth's full of milk, so I can't talk to her, but I swallow the milk and it's gone, and she takes the bowl from my mouth. "How did you come here?", she says again.

Page 20, Paragraph 1 (first full paragraph):

I talk a lot now, and it all runs together. I talk about my mother's foot and my people going away. I talk about the bird with the maggots and the settlers who threw the stone at me and tore my leg. At this, the girl smiles and says that she got the infection out of my leg, and now I feel that my leg doesn't hurt, and I look down at it.

Paragraph 2:

There's no scab. Below my knee the shit and dirt is all washed away, and where my leg's torn there's a leaf, all soft and warm. I look from my leg to her and say, "Why, how is this now?" and so forth. She says she found me here at daybreak and saw that my leg was hurt. She pulled me back into the thicket of trees to hide me, and she fixed my leg while I was unconscious.


*Gee, I've never run into that kind of a situation before.

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