“I don’t have to,” she said. “I’m happy with being forced to do nothing. We have such a wonderful exciting life every day that it is good to be forced to stop and appreciate it. When it is over we are going to wish we’d had time to appreciate it more.”
“We’ll have your diary. Do you remember how we used to read it in bed and remember that wonderful trip through the snow country out around Montpelier and the east end of Wyoming after the blizzard and the tracks in the snow and how we would see the eagles and racing with the streamliner that was the Yellow Peril and all the way along the border in Texas and when you used to drive? You kept a lovely diary then. Do you remember when the eagle caught the possum and he was so heavy he had to drop him?”
“This time I’m always tired and sleepy. Then we’d stop early and be in a motel with a light to write by. It’s harder now when you’ve been up since daylight and you can’t write in bed and have to write it outside and so many unknown bugs and insects come to the light. If I knew the names of the insects that interfere with me it would be simpler.”
“We have to think about poor people like Thurber and how Joyce was finally when they get so they can’t even see what they write.”
“I can hardly read mine sometimes and thank God no one else can read it with the things I put down.”
“We put in rough jokes because this has been a rough-joking outfit.”
“You and G.C. joke so very rough and Pop jokes quite rough too. I joke rough too I know. But not as bad as all of you.”
“Some jokes are all right in Africa but they don’t travel because people don’t realize what the country and the animals are like where it is all the world of the animals and they have predators. People who have never known predators don’t know what you are talking about. Nor people that never had to kill their meat nor if they don’t know the tribes and what is natural and normal. I put it very badly I know, kittner, but I’ll try and write it so it can be understood. But you have to say so many things that most people will not understand nor conceive of doing.”
“I know,” Mary said. “And the liars write the books and how can you compete with a liar? How can you compete with a man who writes how he shot and killed a lion and then they carried him to camp in a lorry and suddenly the lion came alive? How can you compete with the truth against a man who says the Great Ruaha was maggoty with crocodiles? But you don’t have to.”
“No,” I said. “And I won’t. But you can’t blame the liars because all a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I know and that I’ve heard. I’m a liar.”
“But you would not lie to G.C., or Pop, or me on what a lion did, or a leopard did, or what a buff did.”
“No. But that is private. My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad. If I write in the first person, stating it is fiction, critics now will still try to prove these things never happened to me. It is as silly as trying to prove Defoe was not Robinson Crusoe so therefore it is a bad book. I’m sorry if I sound like speeches. But we can make speeches together on a rainy day.”
“I love to talk about writing and what you believe and know and care about. But it’s only on a rainy day that we can talk.”
“I know it, kittner. That’s because we’re here in a strange time.”
“I wish I’d known it in the old days with you and Pop.”
“I was never here in the old days. They just seem old now. Actually now is much more interesting. We couldn’t have been friends and brothers the way we are now in the old days. Pop never would have let me. When Mkola and I got to be brothers it wasn’t respectable. It was just condoned. Now Pop tells you all sorts of things he never would have told me in the old days.”
“I know. I’m very honored that he tells me.”
“Honey, are you bored? I’m perfectly happy reading and not being wet in the rain. You have to write letters too.”
“No. I love for us to talk together. It’s the thing I miss when there is so much excitement and work and we’re never alone except in bed. We have a wonderful time in bed and you say lovely things to me. I remember them and the fun. But this is a different kind of talking.”
The rain was still a steady, heavy beating on the canvas. It had replaced all other things and it fell without varying its beat or its rhythm.