Literature and storytelling

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from the short story "Both of Them Were Right" by Corinna Vasquez-Lindqvist. (Original practice text; the author and story are fictional.) Line numbers appear in the left margin every 5 lines.

I was fourteen the summer Mr. Halvorsen assigned the oral history project, and I chose my great-aunt Bettina because she was the only relative who lived within biking distance. The assignment sheet was specific. We were to record an older family 5 member telling three stories "from memory, in their own words," and then transcribe the recordings exactly, including every pause and repeated phrase. Accuracy, Mr. Halvorsen had written at the bottom and underlined twice, is the historian's first duty. 10 Aunt Bettina lived above the shoe-repair shop she had run for forty years and had closed only the spring before. When I set the borrowed recorder on her kitchen table, she looked at it the way she might have looked at a customer's boot with the sole flapping loose: not unkindly, but as if she already knew it 15 would need more work than its owner expected. "Three stories," she said. "Any three?" "True ones," I said. "It's history." She laughed at that, a short laugh like a drawer shutting, and began. 20 The first story was about the winter her father walked eleven miles through snow to bring a doctor home for her baby brother. I had heard it at Thanksgiving, so I knew what came next, and I recorded it happily. It was only that night, transcribing with headphones on, that I noticed the problem. At Thanksgiving the 25 distance had been nine miles. At Thanksgiving there had been no dog. On my recording, a brown dog named Pilot trotted beside my great-grandfather the whole way and, near the end, found the doctor's house after the snow had covered the road. I rode back the next afternoon with my notebook open to a list. 30 "The miles," I said. "And the dog. Which version is right?" Aunt Bettina was sorting a coffee can of buttons into an egg carton, blue with blue, brass with brass. She didn't look up. "Both of them were right when I told them." "That's not how it works," I said. "Something either happened or 35 it didn't." "Something happened," she agreed. "My father went out in the snow and came back with a doctor, and my brother lived. That part I have never changed and never will." She held a button up to the window, decided it was more green than blue, and moved 40 it. "The rest is how you carry it." I did not understand her, and I said so, a little rudely. She let me finish. Then she told me that her own grandmother had told stories on the porch in the evenings and would stop partway through to ask the children what the weather was like in the 45 story, or what the horse was called. Whatever they answered became true for that night. "She said a story that couldn't bend would break the first time someone new sat down to listen," Aunt Bettina said. "I thought that was a fancy excuse for a bad memory. I was about your age." 50 For the next two weeks I went back every other day. I recorded the second and third stories, and then, because she offered, a fourth and a fifth, and I asked her to tell the first one again. The dog stayed, but the miles became ten. I stopped making lists. Instead I began writing notes in the margins of my 55 transcript: here she slowed down; here she looked at me before she went on; here she added the part about the lantern, maybe because the kitchen was getting dark. When I turned in the project, I included both recorded tellings of the snow story side by side, with the unchanged sentences 60 highlighted in yellow. Mr. Halvorsen wrote "Unusual choice—but defend it" across the top, and I did, in a page and a half that I rewrote four times. Years later, when my own daughter asked me about that winter, I caught myself giving Pilot a white patch over one eye. I had 65 never seen that dog, of course, and neither had my great-aunt. But my daughter leaned closer when I said it, and I understood, finally, what Aunt Bettina had meant about carrying.