Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

In Virginia, Dillard puts a lamb in the oven and decides to go for a walk. Near sunset, she goes up a high grassy hill near Tinker Creek, where she sees a fenced horse barn with a dun mare and a new foal. A little boy plays out front. Dillard asks the little boy about the foal, and she notices he has a peculiar way of speaking: “Who calls his father ‘Father’?” (99). The boy asks Dillard if she knows the Lord as her personal savior, and Dillard realizes she met his mother about a year before. Back then, Dillard approached the house from the opposite direction and asked the woman if she could walk through her property. The woman asked her the same question as the boy and then told Dillard about her church, offering Dillard pamphlets to take home.

The boy seems pleased that Dillard knows his mother, and he strikes up further conversation with her. Dillard realizes he’s lonely, which is why he keeps talking to her. He tells her about a time he stepped on a snake, and Dillard thinks he’s making it up at first, only to belatedly realize he’s telling the truth: “[...] but there was no way now to respond to his story all over again, identically but sincerely” (106).