The Rope Inside the Rope

The strip of rawhide would not tear.

Soren had it looped over two fingers, pulling. It was thinner than a shoelace and the color of old honey, a scrap the leatherman had dropped by the table leg. It stretched. It creaked. It went pale where his fingers pulled hardest. But it would not come apart.

He pulled harder. The edge of the strip cut a white line into his fingertip before the strip gave up anything at all.

"You'll lose a finger before you lose that," the leatherman said. He was old, with a beard like a wire brush, and he was wrapping tools in a canvas roll one at a time, not looking. "Rawhide. Dries harder than the knot you tie in it."

"It's so thin," Soren said.

"Thin as it wants to be. I've hung a full deer off a lace that width. Off two of them."

Soren turned the strip in the light. Where he had stretched it, tiny fibers had pulled loose along the edge, finer than hair, glinting. He tugged one free with his fingernail. It came away like a single thread off a frayed rope.

He pinched the thread and pulled it. It held. He pinched harder. It bit into his skin and held.

"That's just skin," Soren said. Not a question. He was thinking about the back of his own hand, which he could pinch and fold and it did nothing, it was soft, it did not feel like a thing that could hang a deer.

"Was skin," the leatherman said. "Cow skin. Yours is the same stuff. Scrape off the hair, scrape off the fat, dry what's left. What's left is the strong part."

Soren held the single fiber up close to one eye. The market noise went thin and far. Under the light the thread was not one thread. It had a twist in it, the way a rope has a twist, a shine that ran spiral up its length and then vanished and came back.

He pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and drew the spiral, the way the shine wound around and disappeared.

"Why is it twisted," he said.

The leatherman finally looked over. "Everything strong is twisted. Look at any rope. One string snaps. Three strings wound together, they don't. The load slides across all of them."

Soren looked at the fiber again. He unwound rope in his head. A rope was strands, and each strand was smaller strands, and those were smaller ones still, all of it twisting the same way so that no single thin thing ever had to hold the whole weight alone. He had always thought skin was a covering. A bag. The soft outside of a person.

He pinched the back of his own hand and pulled the skin up into a little tent and let it snap flat.

It did not tear. He pulled again, harder, watched it go pale and then pink. It did not tear.

"It's the same," he said. "Mine's the same. It's just wet."

"Wet and full of hair and grease," the leatherman said. "Dry it out, you could tie knots in yourself." He laughed at his own joke and went back to his tools.

Soren did not laugh. He was looking down the length of his own arm now, along the tendon that stood up on the inside of his wrist when he made a fist, the cord under the skin that pulled his fingers closed. He made a fist and let it go, made a fist and let it go, and watched the cord move.

Same rope. The tendon was the pulling-rope. The skin was the wrapping-rope. He touched the front of his shin where it was hard and close to the bone, and thought about how bone was supposed to be the opposite of skin, the stiff thing, the stone thing.

"Is bone this too," he said.

The leatherman shrugged, tying his canvas roll. "Bone's got the rock in it. But strip the rock off and there's rope underneath, they tell me. Rope soaked in stone. That's why an old man's bones go brittle. The stone stays and the rope wears out."

Soren stopped moving his hand.

He was made of rope. Not like a doll stuffed with string. Made of it. The soft part of him and the pulling part of him and the hard part of him were the same twisted fiber wound three ways, wet in him, dry in the scrap on his fingers, soaked in stone in the shin under his thumb. The whole shape of him was one idea repeated at different wetnesses.

He unwound it further in his head. The rope was strands. Each strand three threads twisted. And each thread, he was fairly sure now, would be three finer ones, and those three finer still, down and down, until you reached the smallest twist there was, three of something wound together so tight that a thing thinner than a shoelace could carry a whole deer and a thing thinner than that could carry him, every time he closed his hand, every day, and he had never once felt it working.

He pressed the tendon in his wrist and made a fist and felt the cord go taut.

"How far down does it go," he said. "The twisting. Before it stops being rope."

The leatherman had his roll under his arm and his hat on. "Past where I can see, boy. Past where anybody sold leather can tell you." He nodded at the scrap still hooked over Soren's fingers. "Keep it. It'll outlast you."

Soren stood at the empty table with the honey-colored strip looped on two fingers and pulled it, slow, and felt it refuse him, and under his other thumb the cord in his wrist pulled his fingers tight around the very thing that was made of the very same thread.