An Imperfect Librarian (27 page)

“Wait here,” he told me after he opened the door.

I stepped into the porch then watched as he put a bag of dog food and a bowl into a cardboard box. “Any news about Norah?” I asked.

He stopped what he was doing.

“I could help her, you know,” I added.

He turned round holding the box then came into the porch. He unloaded the box into my arms.

“Have you seen her?”

“There's no ghosts at Cliffhead,” he said as he reached an arm around me to grab a leash off the wall. He dropped it into the box before he opened the door.

I followed him outside onto the gravel path in front of his house. “Are you implying that she's dead?”

He walked casually towards a garage. Its door faced away from me.

I set down the box to open the rear of my car. “They haven't found a body,” I reminded him. When he didn't respond, I
shouted, “I said they haven't found her body.” He disappeared into the garage. I put the box in the car then headed after him. The garage door was raised. I stood behind. In front of us, boxes were piled to the ceiling. “Why are you assuming she's dead?” Folio stood by my side then licked my hand.

Walter took a box in his arms. I could tell by the change in his gait that it was heavy. He walked towards his house then went inside. I held Folio by the collar to stop her from going after him. While he was gone, I let her loose so I could look inside the garage. I'd seen similar boxes in the Crimson Hexagon. These were sealed.

Walter came up behind me with Folio in tow. He nudged me out of the way. More like a shove.

“Answer my question, please,” I said. “I'll go then. You won't see me again. I promise. Just tell me what you know! I'll say nothing about these boxes.”

He turned around, stopped and glared at me. For an instant, I thought he'd kick me like he'd done with the dog. I stood my ground. “Please. I need to know if–”

“Once a fool, always a fool.” He walked out of the garage and headed to his house with another box in his arms.

Folio ran alongside as I followed behind Walter. “What do you mean?”

He walked faster than I did, even with a box in his arms. “Take Folio and go on. Ya' got no business here,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. “Ya' done enough damage. Leave her in peace.” Folio went inside Walter's house. I waited outside. Folio appeared first, then Walter.

“I didn't mean to do her any harm,” I said. “One simple misunderstanding led to another, one innocent mistake followed another. I didn't mean to–”

“Once a fool, always a fool,” he repeated quickly then brushed past.

I rubbed Folio's ears to distract her so she wouldn't run off. I wanted to explain, but it was easier to change the subject. “I don't mind helping with the bail. I know it must have been a financial–”

“The man Kelly from the library, Henry Kelly, put up the bail,” he said, without a glance towards me.

I let go of the dog and followed Walter. This time he closed the door and clinched the padlock. He turned around then walked past me with such determination that he nearly knocked me over.

“Thanks, then. I'll be off,” I said. “Folio will be happy at–”

The house door slammed shut.

I haven't been back to Walter's since then. That was the first and last conversation between us. As for his judgement of the fool, I'm not so sure I agree with him, although I did take his advice to leave Norah in peace. That doesn't mean I've stopped longing for her or that I don't visit the pond regularly. If I run into Walter, I'll tell him I'm there for Folio's sake.

Norah would be pleased with me for taking such good care of Folio, although she'd probably scold me for spoiling her and tell me I should punish her when she pees on the carpet in the bedroom. I plan to eventually put down a hardwood floor anyway. Norah definitely wouldn't approve of Folio sleeping on my bed. The house is so big, Folio could have her own bedroom. When Cyril finishes rewiring the place, he tells me I should consider renting out rooms to tourists in the summertime. “Mainlanders would pay a fortune to spend a week around the bay in a spot like this.”

I have no plans to rent out any rooms. They're reserved for Tatie and Papa's visit. After Tatie heard what happened between me and Norah, she was ready to pack her bags. Papa didn't want to leave France, but he hates staying alone in the house at Cavaillon.

They're tired and disoriented by the time they arrive at the airport. On the drive to my house I tell them about the plans for the next two weeks. We'll go to Mercedes and Cyril's house for a barbeque one evening followed by a haunted hike that starts at the cathedral just across the street. Edith has booked us a boat tour to see puffins and whales. We'll drive with Henry and Nancy to Trinity for a weekend of theatre.

After we arrive at my house, I carry the suitcases up over the steps then leave them in the living room. We go outside to visit the shed that Cyril pokes around in when he comes by. We stroll over by the wharf where a dory and skiff are docked. I tell them about when Henry visits and how the fishermen assume he's from around the bay. I joke that I'll have to book him for elocution lessons. Down on the shore, we're attacked by armies of flies. It's the offal from the fish plant nearby that attracts them. Mercedes says it won't smell as bad in the winter. I can always close the windows in the summer anyway. I haven't got round to buying fly screens so it's just as well. We return to the house and sit together on the couch in the living room with glasses of warm lemonade. Tatie interrupts the ten-minute siesta to announce that she's brought a surprise for me. She kneels on the floor next to the suitcases. “Close your eyes,” she says.

Papa opens a suitcase for her. I hear the clicking of the clasps.

“Open your eyes now,” she says.

I grab her outstretched hand.

“Come closer. Touch, touch!”

The suitcase is filled with books. I take them out one by one.
TinTin
and
Asterix
books are on the top layer. Underneath them I find two bundles of Jules Verne's books. I finger quickly through the tightly bound pages with their black and white engravings. In the very bottom layer, she put the smaller
volumes. There's
The Song of Roland, Renard, The Fables and Tales
and many others.

I stare at them, almost incredulous. “You kept them all. I don't believe it.”

“I had to fight to save them. Georges complained they took up too much space in the closet, as if we had anything else to put in there. Remember? You'd say, ‘Tell me the moral, Tatie, tell me the moral.' It's time, like you, that they had a home where they belong but if you don't have the room right now, I can return them to France. It's no trouble–”

All this time Papa has been sitting quietly. He jumps up suddenly out of his seat and shouts. “We're not returning with them. I'll dump them to the bottom of the sea before I'll lift one hundred and fifty kilos of books halfway around the world again.”

Folio is frightened. I call her to my side. She wags her tail and settles by my legs.

Tatie takes my hand. I help her up off the floor and onto a seat on the couch next to me.

“It's the Atlantic Ocean, not the Atlantic Sea. It's twenty-five kilos for each suitcase. Furthermore, it's not halfway round the world, it's only a quarter. Your Papa never listened to me when I used to tell him, ‘Learn your lessons, Georges.'”

I can see it coming from Papa. He won't let a comment like that past him. “Why should I have listened to you?” he says. “You were always pretending to be my mother. You weren't my mother any more than you were his, isn't that so, Carl?”

Tatie holds a delicate hand to my face. I rest my head in her palm and close my eyes. There's no harshness in the touch, no solicitation or admonishment. I open my eyes again then take her hand in my own. “Of course she's my mother.”

Tatie leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. “Of course.”

Papa throws his arms in the air. “Why are you speaking English? That's enough, don't you think? If it continues I'll be heading home sooner than planned.”

Tatie slides a tissue out from her sleeve. She wipes her eyes and nose then says the very word I had on the tip of my tongue. “Promise?”

H
ENRY CLAIMS IF IT WASN
'
T
for him I'd have a permanent curve in my back from bowing to Francis. He also says I'd have a brown tongue. He still comes by in the afternoon for coffee, although not as often. I vacated the office not long after I moved out of Mercedes and Cyril's basement. “View's no better than the LAB's,” he says in comparison to the Reading Room. The last time I offered him cookies with his coffee, he glanced at the packaging then scolded me for buying biscuits with a high fat content. Apparently, Goddess helped him lose twenty-four pounds. Lately, he only ever talks about Goddess and whether they should buy a house in or outside of town. Sometimes I feel a tinge of nostalgia when I think about those afternoons over coffee and cookies. We're still in touch regularly. He came with me when I bought my new car. I was surprised how civil he was with the salesman. He even gave me a housewarming gift. It's the book
House Repairs for Dummies.

Edith is so busy in her role as Interim Head of Special Collections, she's lost interest in telling me what I should be doing. I went by her office one day, a first for me. She didn't have time to chat. “I'm busy as an eavesdropper with a party line,” she said. Mercedes has stopped trying to fix me up with nurses or any women. I've been officially discharged as her patient. She's more concerned about the health of my house than about me. Cyril is gradually recovering from the disappointment of not having another man on his premises. Two or three times a week, after supper on a fine evening, he drives out for a visit. We sit on the veranda with Folio at my feet, alert to any move, sound or smell. We talk about the price of clapboard, the best quality of paints, about how soon I'll need to have the roof tarred again or about the state of the cod fishery.

Apart from that, not much else has changed. I still can't swim except with a life jacket, still know nothing as far as Henry is concerned, still sound like a foreigner and still have two small beach rocks in my pocket. It's natural for some things to stay the same. Take for example the retriever's instinct to retrieve, the view of the horizon from the top of a cliff on a day without fog, the taste of salt and smoke on skin after a bonfire in a cove, the tenderness of the hand that consoles or the unthinkable terror before the nightmare's climax. It's also natural for some things to change. Eventually, the ripple collapses on the surface of the pond, high tide becomes low, miscalculations evolve into opportunities, the fool becomes wiser.

Henry calls in the distance. “Back off with the
Chicken Bouillon Cube for the Soul
. Make your point!”

My point is that not much has changed. Not even in spite of the lessons. I could practice forever with swimming and still drown without the life jacket. No amount of lessons will make
me pass for a Newfoundlander. I never was clever at lessons. It's about time I admitted it. Of course, I was a star at mathematics. My teachers used to say my ability had flooded into one area and parched the others in consequence. They didn't know about my talent for memorizing. A
Fahrenheit 451
scenario is unlikely but it's always best to be prepared. I know
Robinson Crusoe
by heart now. It's convenient to be able to draw on any page or section of the story no matter where or when. I have a collection of favourite passages, including this one:

I had now brought my state of life to be much easier

in itself than it was at first, and much easier to my

mind, as well as to my body...I learned to look more

upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon

the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather

than what I wanted.

It's the type of ending I would have predicted for Crusoe's tale. As far as my own tale goes, it doesn't have a
happily-ever-after
sort of ending. It's more of a
once-upon-a-time
ending. Henry would probably say, “It was a long-time-coming ending. Give me the abridged version next time.”

Thanks to the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador for its support. I'm grateful for the Writer-in-Residence program at Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador, which gave me the opportunity to receive feedback from some of the finest minds in Canada: Don McKay and Michael Crummey. Mark Callanan is another of those brilliant minds. I could not have wished for a better editor. At Breakwater Books, thank you to Annamarie Beckel for the encouragement I needed to see this book to the end and to Rebecca Rose and Rhonda Molloy as well. Thank you to the expert eyes of librarians Anne Hart, Lorraine Jackson and Suzanne Sexty.

Thanks to the following friends and family who read and commented: Dianne Anderson, Jack Eastwood, Louis Fortier, my son Adrian Gagnon, Carolyn Morgan, the Murphy crowd (Barbara, Anne, Paula [Lewis], Janet [MacDuff], Kieran), Marie Wadden and Elizabeth Yeoman.

I would like to acknowledge three sources I relied on to write the novel. These are:
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
by Nicholas A. Basbanes, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, and the
Library at Night
by Alberto Manguel.