The Green Man (11 page)

His features were finely tooled, his mouth full and red against the almost marble pallor of his face. He was almost
too
good looking. As he ventured farther into the
shop, he glanced her way. She caught a glimpse of those dark dangerous eyes and realized at once she was in the presence of mystery.

Her heart raced. Part of it was the nervousness she felt whenever she was alone in the shop, but more of it was because she was alone with
him
. She tried to calm herself, breathing steadily, evenly. She didn’t dare look his way. Instead, she pretended to be busy. She fussed about the desk, wrapped the dust jackets of a couple of hardcover books in plastic, walked a couple of paperbacks she’d just finished pricing to the racks at the front of the shop. In fact, though, she was busy only with him.

The boy took no notice of her. Despite that, perhaps because of it, he compelled her attention. She watched closely as he climbed the ladder and stretched to see the stock on the highest shelves, quietly moving with the poise and assurance of someone much older. She couldn’t explain it, but the air in the shop was charged with a palpable tension that set her all on edge. He drew her, yet frightened her at the same time.

He settled finally in the poetry section. This immediately piqued her interest, for here was the beating heart of the Green Man. Emily kept the poetry section where she could keep an eye on it. So as the boy browsed through the several shelves that made up the collection, O was able to observe him through a gap between two
piles of books on the desk. She watched him take down the volume of Keats, the little paperback of Milton in the mottled cover, the Rilke odes, Rexroth’s translations of Chinese poems – all things she herself had looked through.

She watched him leaf through them, pause here and there to read a few lines, then return them to their place on the shelf. He handled books with the care of someone who loved them.

You could tell a good deal about a person from their hands. And this boy had the lean veined hands of an artist. They were pure poetry to watch. She wondered where he had come from, how he happened to stumble on the Green Man. He didn’t strike her as a local, but an outsider, like herself.

While she sat watching him, she spun a story about him. He had lived in the country, a lonely child suffocated by the affections of a doting mother. But he was an artist, and when he couldn’t take it anymore, he’d fled. For whatever reason, his travels had taken him to Caledon. She imagined he had only recently arrived. There was still a fluttery look about him, as though he had not yet settled his feathers.

She wondered how she would react if he came to the desk to buy a book. She wished the desk were not so cluttered, so chaotic, but at this point housekeeping was not
an option. She looked down at the little poem she’d been working on when he came into the shop. Afraid he might catch sight of it if he headed her way, she quietly tucked it under a book and busied herself with clearing a little space in the clutter.

The boy stood in the poetry section for a long time. He had stopped going through the books and was just standing there. She sensed something was wrong. She was summoning her courage to wander over and ask him if he needed help finding anything, when suddenly, in one quick fluid motion, he plucked a book from the shelf, flicked open his jacket, and slipped it inside. Bending down, he picked up his backpack and sauntered out of the shop.

O watched in stunned disbelief. Emily had warned her to keep her eyes open for book thieves. With the desk positioned as it was, at the back of the shop, there was ample opportunity and easy escape for anyone who might want to pocket a book.

She told herself she must have been mistaken. She got up and walked over to the poetry section, her legs wobbling, her heart beating like a bird’s. There was a gap in the middle of the
P
section. Emily was bound to notice. The woman had some kind of weird radar when it came to such things. O shifted a few books over to close the gap on the shelf, then went out the front door of the
shop and looked up and down the street. There was no sign of the boy.

For the rest of the day, she could think of nothing but him.

“L
enora Linton?
The
Lenora Linton? I thought she was dead.”

“Well, that would explain the bad connection.”

Emily gave her a look.

“Who
is
Lenora Linton, anyway?” O was up on the ladder, shelving the batch of books she had priced that morning, now that Emily had given them her stamp of approval.

“Lenora Linton is the great-granddaughter of Lawrence Linton.”

“And who was he?”

“Lawrence Linton was one of the most important architects in Caledon’s history. There are examples of his work everywhere: the old city hall, St. Bartholomew’s Church, many of the buildings at the university, in addition to a good number of the grand old houses around town. The old Caledon train depot was his as well, come to think of it.”

“Not the depot I saw.”

“No, there was another depot before that, in a different part of town. It burned to the ground.” She dropped down one of those mind chasms for a moment and was somewhere far away.

“It was Lawrence Linton who brought the Gothic Revival to Caledon,” she continued. “Caledon was a little backwater town when he arrived. But soon towers and turrets and pointed arches were everywhere. Over time, tastes changed. Gothic architecture fell out of favor, and Linton’s work was eclipsed by newer, more modern styles. He came to a curious end, as I recall.”

“Curious? How do you mean?”

“Something happened to him. He spent his last years living alone in the big old house he’d built as a monument to the Gothic style.”

“What was it that happened?”

“I’m not sure. There may be something about him in the local history section in the back room, if you’re interested. In any event, I’d better call Lenora Linton and see what she has to say.”

While Emily made the call, O finished shelving the books. She thought about what Emily had said about Lawrence Linton and wondered what had happened to turn him into a recluse. But apart from a couple of references to his buildings and a grainy photograph of Linton
in middle age, there was nothing in
LOCAL HISTORY
to shed any light on it.

Emily was clearly excited when she hung up the phone. “It
was the
Lenora Linton – still very much among the living. She was very complimentary. Said I came highly recommended to her. By whom? I wonder. All very curious, but flattering nonetheless. At any rate, I’m to get first look at the collection. It could be a gold mine.

“She wants me to come around tomorrow afternoon. She still lives in the old family house. Just to see the inside of that place will be well worth the visit. Perhaps you’d like to come along. I could probably use your help.”

For the rest of the day, Emily walked around on cloud nine. And it wasn’t just the prospect of seeing inside the Linton house that made her that way; it was the dream of hitting the mother lode – something all book dealers dreamt of. It would be the answer to all their troubles. It would take the business from the edge of the cliff, where it teetered now, and set it back on solid ground.

That evening, while O was up in her room reading
A Treasury of Great Poems
and doing her best not to think of her book thief, she stumbled on another mad poet.

John Clare was born in England in 1793 to a poor farming family. One day, when he was five years old, he set out across the fields for the horizon, where he imagined
the end of the world lay. There he hoped to look down from the edge and see into all the secrets of the world. He walked all day, but never seemed to come any closer, so he turned back. When he finally made his way home late that night, he found half the village out searching for him and his parents at their wits’ end.

Though he had little formal education, in his late teens he began to write poetry. His first collection was a great success, and the “peasant poet” was the toast of London society for a short time. Within a few years, however, he was all but forgotten.

He had married at the height of his fame. Now, with a large family to support and no money coming in, he went back to working the fields. He hawked his books from door to door, often dragging a large sack of them thirty miles a day.

The strain of it proved too much. By the time he was forty, he began to experience fits of madness. He imagined he was married to a girl he had known as a boy and had several children by her. He saw visionary creatures and had conversations with Shakespeare’s spirit. He was finally admitted to an asylum as one “addicted to writing poetry.” He spent the last twenty-three years of his life there and continued writing to the end.

O had just closed the book on John Clare, when Emily called up the stairs, asking if she could come down for a
minute. She felt sure her aunt had noticed the missing book in the poetry section and was going to ask who had bought it.

She found Emily at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of tea. Psycho was sitting on her lap. The cat took one look at O and sped off down the hall.

“Would you like some tea, O?”

“Sure. I’ll get a cup.” As she sat down at the table, she tried to read her aunt’s face. The tea was so strong that you could have stood a spoon in it. She reached for the milk.

Then she saw the poem –
her
poem – there on the table in front of Emily. She realized she’d accidentally left it on the desk downstairs, and a sinking feeling hit her in the pit of her stomach.

“I take it this is yours,” said Emily, picking up the sheet.

O nodded. If she had been a crazy white cat, she would have disappeared down the hall.

“Do you have more?” asked Emily.

“Yes.”

“May I see them?”

“They’re not very good.”

“Don’t worry. They never are. You write one so the next will come. And you hope, when it does, it will be a little better than the last.”

“I’ll be right back.” O ran up to her room and returned
with her folder of poems. She flipped through them and found a recent piece.

“I’m a little afraid,” she confessed.

“Me, too – all the time. There’s a lot to be afraid of.”

O took a deep breath, fought back the panic, and read the poem:

As she read, her voice stopped quavering and she grew more at ease. When she finished, she looked over at Emily.

“I see now why you were so vocal about the Tuesdays,” said her aunt. “It seems your father was right.”

“About what?”

“About you. He said you might have the makings of a poet.”

But there was something odd in the way she said it, something unsettling in the look on her face as she stared
down at her tea. Finally, she leaned forward across the table.

“I need to warn you,” she whispered, as though someone might be listening. “Poetry is nothing to be dabbled in. It can be a dangerous thing. Before you go one step farther, I want you to ask yourself if you absolutely have to do it, if something inside you will die if you don’t. If the answer is no, then let it go.”

O wasn’t sure what reaction she’d been expecting from her aunt. Perhaps a little encouragement or support. Certainly not this. She felt angry and hurt. If she stayed one minute longer, she would start to cry – and that was the last thing in the world she wanted Emily to see.

Without a word, O scooped up her poems and ran upstairs to her room, closing the door behind her. She flung the folder down on the desk and threw herself on the bed. Why would Emily talk to her like that? Why would she try to warn her away from writing poetry, as if it were some private club only the truly mad could join? How could it be as dangerous as she made it seem?

The room was suddenly too small to hold her. Her thoughts bounced off the low ceiling, banging against the windowpane like a trapped bird. She needed air and space. Grabbing her notebook and pen from the desk, she crawled out through the window onto the deck and plopped herself down in the plastic chair. She took a deep breath and tried to blow her anger away.

The sun was low and the wind was up, whipping the treetops like a boy beating the bushes with a stick. Up here, with the wide sky spread before her and the dying light weaving its spell, her anger slowly ebbed away, and a calm came over her.

Into that calm came a word, then a line. She reached for her book and wrote it down. Another came, and then another in its wake. She had no idea where they came from, where they led. She listened, she wrote. It was as simple as that. She kept her head down like a swimmer in deep water, reaching out stroke after stroke, buoyed up by blind faith alone.

When inspiration passed, she had two pages of close scrawl. She looked down at the dim sheets. Never before had words flowed out of her like that.

When she first crawled out onto the rooftop deck, O had felt shut up in herself, trapped in a dark well whose high sides she could not hope to scale. But now she was free. She was the wide sky scattered with stars, the wind tossing among the trees.

Slowly she became herself again. She looked out the windows that were her eyes and said,
I am here
.

It was then she heard the noise – a light rattling that seemed to be coming from behind the building. She wondered if it had been going on all the time she was writing.
There it was again. She’d heard odd noises before, when she was sitting on the deck at night. The bakery next door put its garbage cans out back, behind the building, and Emily was constantly complaining about the vermin they attracted.

But this didn’t sound like the scrabbling of rats. Perhaps a dog was nosing around the bins. She tried to catch her last thought before it drifted away. But she was too late – it was gone. The noise kept on.