Page 31, Paragraph 4; Page 32, Paragraphs 1 - 3; Note

Sorry for the delay between posts - it was a busy weekend.

***

Page 31, Paragraph 4:

The men, far away, lift their hands - I do the same. The girl doesn't move. She says, "It's good that they see you with me." "How's it good?", I say, and she replies, "Since the men see that I know you, they're not going to throw stones at you anymore." Way off on the other edge [of the river?] the men walk into where the trees are, so we can't see them anymore. "Come on now," says the girl, "let's get back to the white-skin hut before Hob gets back from the village downriver where he went."

Page 32, Paragraph 1 (first full paragraph):

Walking back, we walk slowly on the wet wood. We come down the ramp from the bridge, and I think about the skeleton woman lying in the darkness below our feet - about all she thinks of in her thin and empty head.*

Paragraph 2:

Taking a long route through the trees at the river's edge and across the reeds, we come to the pigpen. I can tell by where the sun's at in the sky that it's noon. My shadow has become little and frightened - it's hiding beneath my feet.

Paragraph 3:

Resting on the dirt wall, the girl says she's going now to do work for Hob. She scratches at her neck like she has an itch, and says, "I can't come to the pigpen at night, because Hob wants me for a lot of things. I'll come see you in the morning." She says, "I have some bread that I made [for you] so you won't get hungry in the meantime."

*I love that sentence; I'm not really sure why.

Page 31, Paragraphs 2 and 3; Note

Page 31, Paragraph 2:

"It's a woman," the girl says. The woman was put here alive, so that her spirit will stay by the bridge and make the bridge good, so that it doesn't fall or catch on fire." Now the girl stands up and says no more and walks up the ramp, onto the bridge; I follow behind her. As she walks she makes another saying, strange and like a bird's, but it's not the saying about the valley's edge and the darkness of the trees and so forth. She sings this quicker, and it sounds good. It goes like this:

Lie she there beneath the wood,
And bone is she, and bone is she
Lies she there my woman good,
And by the river go we.*

We walk across the bridge, stepping from log to log slowly so we're not slipping on the mold that grows on them, and we come to the middle of the bridge (where one edge is the same distance away as the other). The cold wind is strong now, and the river is so loud beneath us that we can't hear what the other is saying. The girl says something I can't hear, and I say, "How's that?", and she yells louder, and so on. Now above the noise of the river she says, "Look now! Look to the other edge!", and points with her finger to where she wants me to look.

Paragraph 3:

There across the water I see many settlers out hunting. They have spears in their hands and they drag a deer behind them. I'm afraid, because I remember that the girl said they might throw a stone at me - they're that rough. I tell her this now, and make to run off the bridge, but she says, "Hold on." She says, "They know me - they won't hurt you while I'm here. Look," she says, "those men are making a sign at us. Make a sign at them," she says, "and sign that all's well."

*I preserved the rhyme scheme and the meter this time. Yes, I know - that and a couple of bucks will buy me a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Page 30, Paragraphs 6 and 7; Page 31, Paragraph 1

Back at it.

***

Page 30, Paragraph 6:

She says, "How did you see the bridge in the dark?", and I reply by telling her about how I came here to take a piss, after which I went back to the pigpen. She looks at me as if she's thinking about this and smiles. "Come on," she says, "so we can stand on the river bridge."

Paragraph 7:

We walk the whole length of the path, and the river bridge gets bigger as we get closer to it; it's so big that I can't imagine how many trees had to fall to make it. Here by the edge of the bridge, there's a ramp that comes up to it to make the end of bridge higher than the river's edge. The girl lies down on her belly on the ramp up to the bridge, her nose pushed up to the black logs to look between them. Her clothes cling to her ass and show its shapeliness - it makes me think about lifting them up and looking at her, but ah, I'm not going to do it. "Come here," she says, "and look between the logs."

Page 31, Paragraph 1:

I lie down by her on the bridge and look where she tells me to, through the black logs into the darkness beneath them. For a little while I don't see anything, only darkness, but now I can see better, and I see a thin, white shape lying still in the dark. I can't tell if it's a man or a woman, but I can tell it's become nothing but bones and dried-up skin. Its clothes are holey all over, yet there's no hair on the skull, as if it was torn from them. Their eye-sockets look like they're staring at us, and set in its jaw is its teeth, smiling at me.