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Authors: Chris Lynch

Whitechurch (8 page)

BOOK: Whitechurch
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“She looks like Buddy Holly,” Lilly says. “You ever see pictures of him?”

“You know, Lilly,” I snarl, “that’s pretty sick, being opposed to books and libraries and librarians. Maybe you’re a category too. Bibliophobia. Look her up while you’re there, Pauly.”

“Jealous?” Lilly laughs. But if I was wrong, she could do a lot better than that.

“Here it is,” Pauly says, sitting down at our round oak table with a massive gold
Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary.

“You’re very proud of yourself for having taken only ten minutes to find a reference book in a one-room library,” I say.

“Hey,” he points out, “one
big
room.”

“Here,” Lilly says. “‘Bore: To weary by dullness.’” She slams the big book shut, making a road hollow thump that causes Ophelia Lennon to shoot us a look.

This upsets me. “Dammit, Lilly, now look. Ophelia Lennon is angry.”

“Stop wearying me with your dullness, will you, Oakley?” Lilly whispers.

I point a finger at Lilly’s perfect pug nose. “You are just jealous.”

“Of what?” Pauly wants to know, but doesn’t really want to know. He makes like he’s really caught up in the dictionary.

“I’ll tell you what,” Lilly says, giving me a shut-up stare that her boyfriend cannot see. “I’m jealous that, because of whatever Oakley’s doing for the dusty old library lady, he gets to keep the last book he borrowed—like, ten years ago—without paying any fines.”

“Cool,” Pauly says. “Maybe I’ll do it too.”

“Right.” I snort. “First, you never even took out a library book …”

“And second,” Lilly adds, “you never—”

“That’s enough,” Pauly blurts, loudly.

Ophelia Lennon throws us a look, because my friends clash with the library’s style. And they will get worse. The two of them save their poorest performances for the library. My library. I did better when I was five. When I was four.

“Beat it, will ya, guys,” I say.

“Well, he might be able to please your lady friend, but beat it?” says Lilly.

“All right, that does it,” Paul says, even louder now. He rises from his seat and starts unbuckling his pants. We all laugh—except Paul, of course—at the threat the whole town has heard before. “I’ll show ya.”

Even Ophelia Lennon laughs. She laughs like songbird.

“She laughs like a donkey,” Lilly says. She doesn’t mean anything by it, really, she just forgets sometimes.

“Shut up, Lilly,” I say. This is very, very not us. But none of us are us here. This building is not us. It is me. I understand Lilly, but I do not sympathize. “Shut up and go—I mean it.”

“Sorry,” she says. “Um, you’re not coming with us, I take it.”

“Catch you later,” I say, and they go without fight. Pauly never does show us.

I’m alone with Ophelia Lennon. Almost. There is Teddy in his U.S. Postal Service uniform, sleeping at the newspaper rack. But he really doesn’t count. I’m alone with Ophelia Lennon.

Not that I really do much about it. I watch her restack books. I watch her make herself her regular four-fifteen cup of banana tea, then watch her dunk her anisette toast into it. I watch her dust and sweep the room because, as I said, she is responsible for everything about the Whitechurch Library. On days when Ophelia Lennon is sick, the library doesn’t even open.

There is no need for me to pretend to be reading or researching or doing a single damn useful thing with my time. Because nobody is watching. Nobody is watching, as the winter wind bounces off the thin windowpanes, trying to get in. Teddy is there, but he’s Dead Ted, and you couldn’t wake him if you drove a semi through the room pulling on that honky air horn.

So nobody’s watching me watching Ophelia Lennon move her body through her day. Except Ophelia Lennon. She’s watching me watching, and it’s all right with her and it’s all right with me. Only if another somebody comes in does she make me get a magazine or something, so it all doesn’t look weird.

Then there’s nothing left. It’s time to close up the library, and Ophelia Lennon does that. There’s a power to it, the way this building, this quiet smart domain of hers, bends, gives to her. She has the keys to the doors, she turns the heat down. And she turns the lights off, one at a time, when it’s five o’clock and very dark.

By the time we have to wake Teddy and get him out, there are only two dull lights burning from the vaulted ceiling of the old mahogany room, the two lights Ophelia Lennon keeps on when she leaves. The glow from those small yellow bulbs seems to come from nowhere when it lights you up. Seems to come, rather, from inside you, inside your skin. When I approach Teddy, the light seems to come from under his denim-blue flap-hat. When Teddy is up and toddling out and I’m turned back looking at Ophelia Lennon again, the light is burning up from under her collar.

“What?” she says, and tilts her head in a quizzical way that makes me worry what kind of look I’m giving her.

“I didn’t say anything,” I say.

Ophelia Lennon nods, then starts to gather up her stuff, her going-home ritual.

“Can I help with anything?” I ask. “Books to reshelve, windows to close …”

She sighs, comes close to me with her coat over her arm.

“People are going to start to talk,” she says sweetly.

“Cool,” I say in return.

“Well, no. Oakley, when are you going to stop doing this? Hmm? This is not a good thing. You once spent a great many wonderful hours here, and now you spend too many pointless ones. Do you remember that you could recite big bites of Wordsworth by the age of seven? Do you remember that? ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills,/When all at once I saw a crowd,/A host, of golden daffodils.’ Do you remember?”

It is out of respect that I let her finish, though it is the sound of a car wreck to my ears.

“And ‘The Raven.’” Ophelia Lennon is swept up in something now, nostalgia or mania or whatever. But she comes up, intimate-close, and pokes me lightly in the chest. “Every word, by the time you were nine. Oakley, I was absolutely certain you were going to be a poet like your mother.”

You are not supposed to say that, Ophelia Lennon. Didn’t we understand, you and I, that you were not supposed to say that?

Absolutely short-circuited. My wires are so frayed at this moment, I am powerless to keep from doing the most insane and inexplicable thing of my life. I lurch forward and try desperately to kiss Ophelia Lennon. And this move is so far from what she, or any other sentient being, would have expected, I almost pull it off.

For a moment she is confused—though not quite as much as I am. But she gets her hands up between us just in time.

“What could you be thinking?” She is a little angry, but less than she has a right to be. I’ve got no answer, but I don’t think she really expected one. She shakes her head in wonder. “Listen, Oakley, I loved your mother more than anyone on this earth. Almost as much as you did, and that is a lot because I have still never seen anything in life to compare to the two of you. And it is one of the treasures of my existence, the memory of our days here in this place, the three of us … and I am warmed by the very thought of you….”

“See,” I say because, apparently, I have not yet completed my descent into madness.

“No, not ‘see.’ You give me a warm feeling, true enough. But so does
Doctor Zhivago,
and that has nothing to do with the realities of my life either. It is so clearly time for this to stop. I have watched you, and I have hoped for something else, something better, something bigger, something further, something different. So you will not be a poet. That is a pity, but not necessarily a tragedy. The troubling part is watching you pull inward, and backward. In time. In geography.

“Turn around, son. Go the other way. Please.”

The daffodils poem sounds remotely familiar, but it is probably just one of those things like, “I took the road less traveled by,” or “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” You know, stuff everybody picks up by osmosis just because there are teachers and librarians and just general jerks spitting it out at you throughout your life. She is exaggerating me as a kid, Ophelia Lennon is, and the only reason I don’t say she is outright lying is out of respect.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She takes my shoulders firmly and turns me toward the exit. We head out, and the last thing is, she pulls on and buttons up her red cloth coat with the faux fur collar against the wind that has been waiting out there to bite at me and Ophelia Lennon.

It is possible I remember that coat. I have another haywire urge, this time to bury my face in that collar, and to have the wearer wrap her arms around me. But it is a very very very different urge from the last urge. The opposite, in fact. I think, though, that I will get a grip in time. I will sort. But for now I’m thinking it will be enough to be near, near the coat and the wearer and the library.

I do reach out and touch the sleeve though. I rub rough cloth between my fingers and I know it. I know I know the feel of that coat. I close my eyes for seconds.

“Oakley,” Ophelia Lennon says as the bitter wind tears over us. “I don’t want you coming around here and wasting away like you have been. If you come into this library again, I want it to be to make use of the books. To make use of
you
. Otherwise, don’t come.” She turns up her collar for emphasis, for punctuation.

I wonder for a moment if I can do that, go back into the books in the Whitechurch Library.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “For what I tried to do. I won’t try it again, I swear.”

“Don’t apologize,” she says. “I half think I’d let you, if it meant you’d read John Donne with me again.”

I reach out and shake her hand.

“I’ll see you around, Ophelia Lennon.” I can feel my head shaking no. “But I’ll be leaving you and John Donne be.”

I turn around quickly because I cannot bear to read her face.

Older folks and their funky saddening memories. I simply don’t have the strength.

Place & Time

W
HO DO YOU LOVE
?

Why?

What do you do?

Where?

Home.

The place

where when you go

they have to let you in.

More

still more

poetic gobbledygook.

Why,

and why

does the poet

lie?

Because he is Lucifer

and that’s what the devil does?

Or because he is your friend

and that’s what your friend does?

And is there a difference?

Or does the distinction

matter?

Lie.

Because life itself

is not truthworthy.

Hi Dad, I say

at home

to my father’s head

or his back

on the couch.

Or Hi Dad, I say

at home

to his indentation

in the couch.

That is home.

And I’m one

of the lucky ones.

Your people are your home.

And they do not have to let you in

if they don’t feel like it.

Whitechurch

is my home.

Sentenced

to Whitechurch

like the man says.

It is my place.

I know my place.

Place and time.

My place is

seven hills

and very few people

scattered among them.

Ever seen a mouse

try to escape

a bathtub?

My time

suspended.

Time.

Unlimited.

Unfortunately.

Time

so lightly

does its business

that nothing

seems to be happening.

Do I have a time?

Preacher says we do

all

have a time.

To be born

to die

to love

to hate

to everything

there’s a season.

What do I do with my season,

with my time

when it gets here?

Do I dare disturb the universe?

A friend wanted to know.

But we have an agreement.

I won’t disturb the universe

as long as the universe

doesn’t

disturb

me.

A Smile Relieves a Heart That Grieves

F
UNNY PLACE, WHITECHURCH ON
Sunday mornings. Funny place most of the time, but on a Sunday morning after church is letting out it’s a differently funny place than usual. Particularly considering that it’s a town named after the very church almost everyone is piling out of. And added to that we still do black Sunday clothes here, so we can be a pretty scary lot, dark-clouding it up and down our streets.

We’re on our way home from church. It happens a few times a year. It is Pauly’s idea. It is never my idea to go to church. Not that I have anything against church. There is plenty to recommend it. It is the tallest building in town. And the pointiest. There is no spot in town where your eye isn’t pulled to this brilliant white god rocket of a steeple, and you can’t help thinking, Yes, something goes
on
there. Board this rocket, and you will go someplace.

It is a suggestive building, and maybe if services consisted of walking around and around and around it, then that might be the thing. But now and then I go inside and—no bang. I like the outside better.

Pauly believes there’s more to it, but mostly what he does is fidget and stare up one wall and down another, sit and stand and kneel at all the wrong times, and appear basically lost. But game. Trying his ass off to pull something from it.

Anyway, we are on our way home from church.

“‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” sayeth Pauly.

This is what he does. Always comes away with some bit that caught his ear. No context, though. He has little interest in, or little capacity for, context.

“‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” he repeats. “I love the sound of that. Oak, don’t you love the sound of that?”

“Ya, it’s all right. Beats ‘Do unto others,’ I guess. Sometimes it seems like every time we come, it’s ‘Do unto others’ week.”

“Ah, what are you talking about? I like ‘Do unto others.’ ‘Do unto others’ is so … rich with possibilities. You don’t know what you’re talking about, Oakley. ‘Do unto others’ kicks ass. After ‘My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?’ and now ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ I’d say ‘Do unto others’ rocks with the best of them.”

BOOK: Whitechurch
7.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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