The last page and a half of The Lord of the Rings is as easy to parody and denigrate as the rest of the book.  Of course, you’ve not gotten to the Appendices yet, where you will find that the formality of language and the divergences in speech throughout the book (it’s one book; an early publisher, chicken that nobody was interested, divided it into three volumes) are precisely accounted for.  You have been reading the Red Book of Westmarch, kept mostly through the years by the descendents of Sam and Pippin and Merry.

 

Because this epic has been ripped off through the years by every crappy sci-fi writer and even Saturday cartoon producers, the images and the character templates are as lost to their originalities as were their antecedents like Beowulf.  We receive the final movie next month, and so probably ends forever the magic of the books and the writing.  For right around the third chapter, die hard cynics like myself, even though prepped by being an English major, are often ready to toss it away.  Then, it all starts to click: it’s neither this world nor another, but an adjacent reality forever adhered.  It’s a story longed for and done well and allows your own color template to singe it. 

 

Here you meet the fourth of the Istari (wizards) mentioned in the book – Radagast, Saruman, and Gandalf being the others - as the last of the Eldar and elder elves leave with the ringbearers.  They don’t know it yet, but Sam, Legolas, and Gimli will also make the trip later, and Aragorn and his wife Arwen, a now mortal Elf, die along with the Hobbits in their time.  All men die, of course.  It is their fate in this pre-Christian Europe in a tale by a very Catholic and religious man in a book that discusses religion as often as defecation and sex: not at all.  Yet, it is a highly religious work by any standard. 

 

 

As they came to the gates Cirdan the Shipwright came forth to greet them. Very tall he was, and his beard was long, and he was grey and old, save that his eyes were keen as stars; and he looked at them and bowed, and said: 'All is now ready.'

 

Then Cirdan led them to the Havens, and there was a white ship lying, and upon the quay beside a great grey horse stood a figure robed all in white awaiting them. As he turned and came towards them Frodo saw that Gandalf now wore openly on his hand the Third Ring, Narya the Great, and the stone upon it was red as fire. Then those who were to go were glad, for they knew that Gandalf also would take ship with them.

 

But Sam was now sorrowful at heart, and it seemed to him that if the parting would be bitter, more grievous still would be the long road home alone. But even as they stood there, and the Elves were going aboard, and all was being made ready to depart, up rode Merry and Pippin in great haste. And amid his tears Pippin laughed.

 

'You tried to give us the slip once before and failed, Frodo,' he said. 'This time you have nearly succeeded, but you have failed again. It was not Sam, though, that gave you away this time, but Gandalf himself!’

 

'Yes,' said Gandalf; 'for it will be better to ride back three together than one alone. Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.'

 

Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out onto the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a green country under a swift sunrise.

 

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West.  There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart. Beside him stood Merry and Pippin, and they were silent.

 

At last the three companions turned away, and never again looking back they rode slowly homewards; and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the Shire, but each had great comfort in his friends on the long grey road.

 

At last they rode over the downs and took the East Road, and then Merry and Pippin rode on to Buckland; and already they were singing again as they went. But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.

 

He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said.

 

Ernest Hemingway famously remarked that all true stories end in death.  Depressing as that is, here are the last pages of three still popular books made into movies of questionable equality.  All three writers are utterly at home in their worlds, and aren’t the least bit defensive about religion, or talking animals, or adjacent realities.  It is coincident that they are all male.  The point here is that the endings of movies are often melodramatic and, well, maudlin.  The books retain a dignity with the silence of inner turmoil, of hearts breaking. 

 

Final pages of Charlotte’s Web by E.B.White

 

I cannot recall.  This was first read to me, I think, with my cousin Christopher by his mother, my Aunt Eleanor, at Foxleigh Farm in Rehobeth when the book first came out in the early fifties.  Also by my mother back in New Bef.  Both can’t be true.  In either case, loved it then, love it now.  I was appalled that they made a cartoon movie of it, with songs of course.  White’s subsequent book, Stuart Little, didn’t do as much for me but I was older then.  And, frankly, Charlotte was a more memorable character of the sort children love: she had a secret she shared with friends.   Having this read to you on long summer evenings on an actual farm probably made the difference.  These were the last big childrens’ books published before television became the nation’s babysitter.  I was very lucky in that regard.  It’s the first book I remember sobbing over, with the burning trachea and deep feeling of loss, both for a spider and for the fact it was over.

 

Charlotte and Wilbur were alone. The families had gone to look for Fern. Templeton was asleep. Wilbur lay resting after the excitement and strain of the ceremony. His medal still hung from his neck; by looking out of the corner of his eye he could see it.

 

“Charlotte,” said Wilbur after awhile, “why are you so quiet?”

 

“I like to sit still,” she said. “I’ve always been rather quiet.”

 

“Yes, but you seem specially so today. Do you feel all right?”

 

“A little tired, perhaps. But I feel peaceful. Your success in the ring this morning was, to a small degree, my success. Your future is assured. You will live, secure and safe, Wilbur. Nothing can harm you now. These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, and the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur—this lovely world, these precious days…”

 

Charlotte stopped. A moment later a tear came to Wilbur’s eye. “Oh, Charlotte,” he said. “To think that when I first met you I thought you were cruel and bloodthirsty!”

 

When he recovered from his emotion, he spoke again.

 

“Why did you do all this for me?” he asked. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.”

 

“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

 

“Well,” said Wilbur. “I’m no good at making speeches. I haven’t got your gift for words. But you have saved me, Charlotte, and I would gladly give my life for you—I really would.”

 

“I’m sure you would. And I thank you for your generous sentiments.”

 

“Charlotte,” said Wilbur. “We’re all going home today. The Fair is almost over. Won’t it be wonderful to be back home in the barn cellar again with the sheep and the geese? Aren’t you anxious to get home?”

 

For a moment Charlotte said nothing. Then she spoke in a voice so low Wilbur could hardly hear the words.

“I will not be going back to the barn,” she said. Wilbur leapt to his feet. “Not going back?” he cried. “Charlotte, what are you talking about?”

 

“I’m done for,” she replied. “In a day or two I’ll be dead. I haven’t even the strength enough to climb down into the crate. I doubt if I have enough silk in my spinnerets to lower me to the ground.”

 

Hearing this, Wilbur threw himself down in an agony of pain and sorrow. Great sobs wracked his body. He heaved and grunted with desolation. “Charlotte,” he moaned. “Charlotte! My true friend!”

 

“Come now, let’s not make a scene,” said the spider. “Be quiet, Wilbur. Stop thrashing about!”

 

“But I can’t stand it,” shouted Wilbur. “I won’t leave you here alone to die. If you’re going to stay here I shall stay, too.”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Charlotte. “You can’t stay here. Zuckerman and Lurvy and John Arable and the others will be back any minute now, and they’ll shove you into that crate and away you’ll go. Besides, it wouldn’t make any sense for you to stay. There would be no one to feed you. The fair Ground will soon be empty and deserted.”

Wilbur was in a panic. He raced round and round the pen. Suddenly he had an idea—he thought of the egg sac and the five hundred and fourteen little spiders that would hatch in the spring. If Charlotte herself was unable to go home to the barn, at least he must take her children along.

 

Wilbur rushed to the front of his pen. He put his front feet up on the top board and gazed around. In the distance he saw the Arables and the Zuckermans approaching. He knew he would have to act quickly.

 

“Where’s Templeton?” he demanded.

 

“He’s in that corner, under the straw, asleep,” said Charlotte.

 

Wilbur rushed over, pushed his strong snout under the rat, and tossed him into the air.

 

“Templeton!” Screamed Wilbur. “Pay attention!”

 

The rat, surprised out of a sound sleep, looked first dazed then disgusted.

 

“What kind of monkeyshine is this?” he growled. “Can’t a rat catch a wink of sleep without being rudely popped in the air?”

 

Listen to me!” cried Wilbur. “Charlotte is very ill. She only has a short time to live. She cannot accompany us home, because of her condition. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that I take her egg sac with me. I can’t reach it, and I can’t climb. You are the only one that can get it. There is not a second to be lost. The people are coming—they’ll be here in no time. Please, please, please, Templeton, climb up and get the egg sac.”

 

The rat yawned. He straightened his whiskers. Then he looked up at the egg sac.

 

“So!” he said, in disgust. “So, it’s old Templeton to the rescue again, is it? Templeton do that, Templeton please run down to the dump and get me a magazine clipping, Templeton please lend me a piece of string so I can spin a web.”

 

“Oh, hurry!” said Wilbur. “Hurry up, Templeton!”

 

But the rat was in no hurry. He began imitating Wilbur’s voice.

 

“So, it’s ‘Hurry up, Templeton,’ is it?” he said. “Ho, ho. And what thanks do I ever get for these services, I would like to know? Never a kind word for old Templeton, only abuse and wisecracks and snide remarks. Never a kind word for a rat.”

 

“Templeton,” said Wilbur in desperation, “if you don’t stop talking and get busy, all will be lost, and I will die of a broken heart. Please climb up!” Templeton lay back in the straw. Lazily he placed his forepaws behind his head and crossed his knees, in an attitude of complete relaxation.

 

“Die of a broken heart,” he mimicked. “How touching! My, my! I notice that it’s always me you come to when in trouble. But I’ve never heard of anyone’s heart breaking on my account. Oh, no. Who cares anything about old Templeton?”

 

“Get up!” screamed Wilbur. “Stop acting like a spoiled child!”

 

Templeton grinned and lay still. “Who made trip after trip to the dump?” he asked. “Why, it was old Templeton! Who saved Charlotte’s life by scaring that Arable boy away with a rotten goose egg? Bless my soul, I believe it was old Templeton. Who bit your tail and got you back on your feet this morning after you had fainted in front of the crowd? Old Templeton. Has it occured to you that I’m sick of running errands and doing favors? What do you think I am, anyway, a rat-of-all-work?

 

Wilbur was desperate. The people were coming. And the rat was failing him. Suddenly he remembered Templeton’s fondness for food.

 

“Templeton,” he said. “I will make you a solemn promise. Get Charlotte’s egg sac for me, and from now on I will let you eat first, when Lurvy slops me. I will let you have your choice of everything in the trough and I won’t touch a thing until you’re through.”

 

The rat sat up. “You mean that?” he said.

 

“I promise. I cross my heart.”

 

“All right, it’s a deal,” said the rat. He walked to the wall and started to climb. His stomach was still swollen from last night’s gorge. Groaning and complaining, he pulled himself slowly to the ceiling. He crept along till he reached the egg sac. Charlotte moved aside for him. She was dying, but she still had strength enough to move a little. Then Templeton bared his long ugly teeth and began snipping the treads that fastened the sac to the ceiling. Wilbur watched from below.

 

“Use extreme care!” he said. “I don’t want a single one of those eggs harmed.”

 

“Thith thtuff thicks in my mouth,” complained the rat. “It’th worth than caramel candy.”

 

But Templeton worked away at the job, and managed to cut the sac adrift and carry it to the ground, where he dropped it in front of Wilbur. Wilbur heaved a great sigh of relief.

 

“Thank you, Templeton,” he said. “I will never forget this as long as I live.”

 

“Neither will I,” said the rat, picking his teeth. “I feel as though I’d eaten a spool of thread. Will, home we go!”

 

Templeton crept into the crate and buried himself in the straw. He got out of sight just in time. Lurvy and John Arable and Mr. Zuckerman came along at that moment, followed by Mrs. Arable and Mrs. Zuckerman and Avery and Fern. Wilbur had already decided how he would carry the egg sac—there was only one way possible. He carefully took the little bundle in his mouth and held it there on top of his tongue. He remembered what Charlotte had told him—that the sac was waterproof and strong. It felt funny on his tongue and made him drool a bit. And of course he couldn’t say anything. But as he was being shoved into the crate, he looked up at Charlotte and gave her a wink. She knew he was saying good-bye in the only way he could. And she knew her children were safe.

 

“Good-bye!” she whispered. Then she summoned all her strength and waved one of her front legs at him.

She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people what had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

 

As time went on, and the months and years came and went, he was never without friends. Fern did not come regularly to the barn any more. She was growing up, and was careful to avoid childish things, like sitting on a milk stool near a pigpen. But Charlotte’s children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, year after year, lived in the doorway. Each spring there were new little spiders hatching out to take the place of the old. Most of them sailed away, on their balloons. But always two or three stayed and set up housekeeping in the doorway.

 

Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web. Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

 

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

 

 

This is the end of a famous short story by Hemingway’s spiritual descendent: really, the only one I know of.  Maclean is biblical in style and cadence and his magic as a writer is that it rings like a quarter vibrating to stasis while truths outside our experience lock into memory.  

 

 

Final pages of A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

 

On the Big Blackfoot River above the mouth of Belmont Creek the banks are fringed by large Ponderosa pines. In the slanting sun of late afternoon the shadows of great branches reached from across the river, and the trees took the river in their arms. The shadows continued up the bank, until they included us.

 

A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us. As we were packing our tackle and fish in the car, Paul repeated, “Just give me three more years.” At the time, I was surprised by the repetition, but later I realized that the river somewhere, sometime, must have told me, too, that he would receive no such gift. For, when the police sergeant early next May wakened me before daybreak, I rose and asked no questions.

 

 Together we drove across the Continental Divide and down the length of the Big Blackfoot River over forest floors yellow and sometimes white with glacier lilies to tell my father and mother that my brother had been beaten to death by the butt of a revolver and his body dumped in an alley.

 

My mother turned and went to her bedroom where, in a house full of men and rods and rifles, she had faced most of her great problems alone. She was never to ask me a question about the man she loved most and understood least. Perhaps she knew enough to know that for her it was enough to have loved him. He was probably the only man in the world who had held her in his arms and leaned back and laughed.

 

When I finished talking to my father, he asked, “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

 

Finally, I said, “Nearly all the bones in his hand were broken.”

 

He almost reached the door and then turned back for reassurance. “Are you sure that the bones of his hand were broken?” he asked. I repeated, “Nearly all the bones in his hand were broken.” “In which hand?” he asked. “In his right hand,” I answered.

 

After my brother’s death, my father never walked very well again. He had to struggle to lift his feet, and, when he did get them up, they came down slightly out of control. From time to time Paul’s right hand had to be reaffirmed; then my father would shuffle away again. He could not shuffle in a straight line from trying to lift his feet. Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting.

 

For some time, though, he struggled for more to hold on to. “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?” he asked. I said, “Everything.” "It’s not much, is it?” “No,” I replied, “but you can love completely without complete understanding.” “That I have known and preached,” my father said.

 

Once my father came back with another question. “Do you think I could have helped him?” he asked. Even if I might have thought longer, I would have made the same answer. “Do you think I could have helped him?” I answered. We stood waiting in deference to each other. How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions?

 

After a long time he came with something he must have wanted to ask from the first. “Do you think it was just a stick-up and foolishly he tried to fight his way out? You know what I mean–that it wasn’t connected with anything in his past.”

 

“The police don’t know,” I said.

 

“But do you?” he asked, and I felt the implication.

 

“I’ve said I’ve told you all I know. If you push me far enough, all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman.”

“You know more than that,” my father said. “He was beautiful.”

 
          “Yes,” I said, “he was beautiful. He should have been – you taught him.”

 

My father looked at me for a long time–he just looked at me. So this was the last he and I ever said to each other about Paul’s death.

 

Indirectly, though, he was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.”

 

Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?

 

“Only then will you understand what happened and why.

 

“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

 

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

 

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

 

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

 

I am haunted by waters.