The Knot

The girl was oiling the long board of the press when her thumb caught on a dark whorl in the grain, a hard round eye in the pale wood where the plane had not been able to smooth it flat. She rubbed at it a while, thinking it was a stain, and then she saw that it went down into the wood and was part of it. She called Nyra over to look.

“It will not come clean,” the girl said. “I have oiled it twice and it stays dark. Is the board spoiled?”

Nyra set her thumb beside the girl’s and pressed the dark eye of the grain. “That is a knot,” she said. “It is not a stain and it will not come clean, because it is not dirt. It is the place where a branch once left the trunk. The tree grew a limb there, and then lost it, and went on growing anyway, and the wood closed over the wound in a hard ring. What you are touching is the memory of a branch that is no longer there.”

The girl looked at the knot with new eyes. “Could a book hold that,” she asked, “the way it holds other things? Could it keep the knot?” Nyra smiled and shook her head. “A book could keep the word for it,” she said. “It could write down that the board has a knot, and where, and how wide. But it could not keep the slow years of the tree, or the weight of the branch before it fell, or the one summer the limb threw its shade. The word is a small dry thing. The knot is all the rest.”

They finished the board together, oiling around the knot and not against it, and the girl found that she no longer wanted it gone. It was the one place on the long pale board that remembered being a tree, and she thought that the press was the better for keeping it, the way a page is the better for a reader who knows what the words leave out.