Whitechurch

by Chris Lynch

  And I would bet everything that in four days nobody would have to shush anybody else in the Whitechurch Library.

  But they did not open up the library for the occasion. Those kind of things don’t happen. They did Chomskys’ and the church, and everybody’s by now turned out for at least part of it. Except me.

  “Yo,” Pauly says, standing at the wall of glass that takes up so much of the library’s face.

  “Yo,” I say from the other side of the glass.

  “I want you to let me in,” he says.

  “I don’t want to let you in.”

  “Then I want you to come out.”

  “If I wanted to be out, I wouldn’t have gotten in.”

  “Anyway, how’d you do that?”

  “Let myself in,” I say. “Have my own set of keys.” A sudden maybe perverse but maybe not wave of pride comes over me. I say it again. “I have my own set of keys. Like I own the place. Did you know that, Pauly? Had ’em for years. What do you think of that?”

  There is a pause, then a nod from Pauly. “I think that’s great, Oak. I think that’s the balls.”

  There is a pause, from me. “Ya, isn’t it.”

  “Come on, Oakley, let me in. I swear I won’t do a thing I’m not supposed to, once you tell me what I’m not supposed to. I just think I should, you know, hang around with you.”

  I go quiet like I’m thinking about it, only I’m not thinking about it. “Sorry. Our hours are posted on the front door. Please come back during regular library hours.” I pull closed the semi-sheer curtain between us.

  “Come on, Oakley, you know I understand. I’m a poet, remember?”

  I whip the curtain back open again, and point my finger at his face. “Don’t. Don’t you dare, Pauly. Not today.”

  “Maybe you’ll like it. In fact, I know you’ll—”

  “Go away,” I snap. I close the curtain and march away from the window. He is tapping and tapping away at it, but I cannot return, not right now.

  I have barely reached the little room Ophelia Lennon called “the snug” when I hear more tapping. The snug is the coziest of reading rooms, with six upholstered tub chairs randomly placed around an oval teak coffee table. The snug was used for book discussion groups and meetings, for preschool story hour and after-school study hall. But mostly all anybody did was make up some nonsense excuse to get in there because more than anything else the snug was just like it sounds. Snug. More than any place you could imagine, this was snug. Kids have been known to seep into the snug and not come out for whole days. Fact.

  There is a tall thin sofa table along one wall as you enter, and it was used for the coffeemaker and scones and the like when there was a group in there. When you were alone, it was the place where a certain strong scent would cause you to look up and find that a cup of banana tea and a piece of anisette toast had appeared out of nowhere. The room still smells like banana tea and anisette toast.

  Still the knocking. One of the things that help the snug be snug is that there is but one window, and it is miniature and way high up. Like a basement window. So nobody could ever be looking in on you. And if they even wanted to knock they had to find a tree branch to do it. Like now.

  “Leave me alone, Lilly.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Ya, you will.”

  “Ah, no, I won’t.”

  “I have a gun in here.”

  “You do like hell have a gun in there.”

  “Lilly, really, please just leave me be. Okay?”

  “No, I don’t understand, Oakley.”

  “You don’t have to understand. You just have to fuck off.”

  That was a mistake. I know that was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake before I said it, but I said it anyway. Might say it again too, if she wants to keep this up.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Besides fucking off, is there anything else I can do?”

  “No. That’ll be enough. Thanks, Lil.”

  I listen for what goes on out there, and there is nothing. Which is good. If she were pretending to leave I’d hear something, like her throwing down the stick or the exaggerated shuffling of the feet. Lilly does the right thing. Of course.

  As do I. I go for a browse.

  I walk first, just for the exercise. I go a lap, and a lap feels good so I go another lap. As I do the second lap of the periphery of the big room, I get a little bolder touching things, running my finger along small statues and shelves and spines of books and if you think this is a dusty old library, that Ophelia Lennon maintained a library that had one speck of dust settled anywhere near her titles, then you are wrong. My finger is cleaner after I swipe it over books than before.

  Third lap I can stop. I can select titles. I can pull any one, I am sure, and she will have told me something about what is in there. I pull out Tender Is the Night. “The dew was still on her” comes to mind even though I never read it. She loved that one like nuts, said it every chance. I gently replace Tender Is the Night. It will not have to be refiled.

  I go to the Religion section and pull out the King James Bible. “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” There is a nice echo in here, just enough to make the Sermon on the Mount sound godly even in my voice. Or hers. Or hers. Even though she was really more of an Ecclesiastes fan.

  I had forgotten how good books feel. Soft and padded-leathery, the books in the Whitechurch lending library were treated more like show horses than lifeless things. They had a smell, like they’d always been recently rubbed down with mink oil or something keeping them all buttery. Very few volumes made a crackly sound when you open them. Forever young, her books were supposed to be, and it feels now like she almost did it. The look and feel and smell of everything here now reminds me so close of when I used to read.

  I hate poetry. John Donne I hate. Probably more than the rest, but the competition is stiff. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls.” Fine, John, I won’t. Liars, poets. Phonies or jackasses or tricksters, but for sure fucking liars like John fucking Donne. Death be not fucking proud. As if it matters whether death is fucking proud or fucking ashamed of itself like it should be. “One short sleep past, we wake eternally.” Really, John. Do tell, John. Thanks for clueing us, John. No really, thanks. “And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”

  “Seems to me, John, that death is still here, but the ladies who read me your poems are gone.”

  Think of the time I wasted.

  “Who you got in there with you?” Pauly calls from the front of the building.

  “I told you to go away, Paul.”

  “I did. Now I came back.”

  “Excellent, so now you know the way. ’Bye.”

  “You ready to hear, Oakley?”

  “This is really a good time for you to be gone, Pauly. Thanks and everything. But go, okay?”

  “That’s not what you want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “Ya, but that’s not really what you want. C’mon, Oakley, this is me. I know you. You should have me here.”

  I am certain I am slow deep-breathing loud enough for him to hear it out on the sidewalk. “Don’t take this personally, ya psychotic bastard, but really you are of no use to me. Useless, you know the term? So what I want is for you to go as far away as you can. Can you do that? If I slow it down, a lot, and repeat it very very carefully for you, do you think you could manage to go? Away?”

  He is of course gone already before I get to the slowed-down version. And I don’t care.

  I sit at Ophelia Lennon’s desk, which sits in the center of the Whitechurch Library. It is a very old oak desk chair that sits on four tiny wheels of I think three different sizes. It is made comfortable, though, by pink-velvet seat cushions, secured with short shoestring-like ties. When I swivel, the chair whines out a dry small cry. I swivel some more and some more, seeing every bit of the library pass before me once and twice and thrice.

  She was the only person I knew in this world who regularly used the word “t
hrice.” I swear she maneuvered conversations to get that word in.

  Thrice.

  It’s an excellent word, and I don’t know why I don’t use it more.

  I pull open Ophelia Lennon’s desk drawer. And I cannot bear Ophelia Lennon’s desk drawer. Tea bags and stubby yellow pencils and recent and very not-recent issues of dull-as-dirt professional library journals, some of them with her name, Ophelia Lennon, on that little white address sticker, and some with the name of the previous head librarian still. Still. White hard mint candies with red diagonal stripes in clear cellophane with tightly twisted ends. If you were a kid in this library and you dared to sniffle, you got one of those. Likewise if you were an adult in this library. Likewise if you were any other sniffly snuffly being in this library. It was a very old tradition here.

  I close the drawer and will never open it again.

  I think about that. Maybe I will. There were once two librarians in the Whitechurch Library, once upon a fairy-tale time. Then there was one. And now there is not. Who knows what happens now? Who knows, the way things go? Maybe I should step into the job before the building itself goes gentle into that good night.

  I’ve got the pedigree. But they may need somebody who reads books.

  The phone rings. How ’bout this? Everybody in town is at the burial. Of the town’s only librarian. Everybody except me. And I’m inside the library. And the phone rings. And the library wasn’t even open on Saturdays even when the librarians were alive. I must say, when the phone rings in this very serious emptiness, I jump. But I answer.

  Maybe it’s one of them, I figure. Maybe it’s a lot line, and I’m going to pick up and find one of them on the other end. The dead librarians of Whitechurch hot line.

  “Oakley?” This is the only living person’s voice I will tolerate at this moment. But I will tolerate it just barely, and just for a moment.

  “Oakley,” Lilly repeats. “I’m worried about you.”

  This brings a strange small smile to my painfully unsmiling face. “Worried? About me? I’m the sane one, remember?”

  “Right. Well you can save that for all the people who don’t know. I know better. And you are scaring me.”

  “Finally,” I say, and in a way I am actually, truly pleased to hear this. “After all this time, finally you find me scary. That mean you love me now?”

  “Loved you before,” she says, and really I have no retort for that. Dead space. Dead air, over the phone line. That is my retort.

  Lilly picks it up for both of us. “I baked,” she says.

  This is newsworthy. If it was not obituary-related baking, this would be front-page Whitechurch Spire material.

  “You did what, Lilly?”

  “Apple-blackberry torte, how’s that?”

  I kind of know what that means. It is infinitely sad to me.

  “You baked.”

  “I baked.”

  “You taste it?”

  “Yup. I worked really hard. Tastes like crap.”

  I am sure it does not. To my knowledge Lilly has never even turned an oven on before, much less commanded all the forces it must take to bake something from scratch. But I do not for a minute doubt that she did it, and probably did it okay.

  “You didn’t even know her, Lilly. You never even met—”

  “I know you, though.”

  Here is where it’s good to be on the phone, because I think now I’m going to do what I do not do. I think now I’m going to cry.

  “So,” she says after a respectful pause, “I’m gonna go to the house.”

  “Nnnhh,” I say.

  “Come with?”

  This is so huge, and so impossible, I just get worse, and feel more and more stupid for it, but am speechless all the same. I shake my head into the phone.

  “You shaking your head now, Oakley?”

  I nod.

  “I think you should come. I do. I’ll be there, so it’ll be all right.”

  I shake my head no.

  “I think it’ll be good for you. Maybe this is, like, the thing, the moment, you know? Your release, your walking papers, your diploma.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe this finally cuts the cord—”

  “No.”

  “Breaks the chain—”

  “No.”

  “I’m thinking of you, Oakley. I’m thinking you deserve better and more and stuff. Come with.”

  Come with. I’m thinking about “Come with” as I hang dumbly on the phone, and then it comes into view. The procession, filing past the library. The hearse. The flower car. The cars full of mostly older folks who can’t do a lot of walking. Then the bulk of mourners, on foot. Spooks, the lot of them, floating past, through the haze of the gauze of the curtains of the library window. Then they stop, right out front.

  “You see it,” Lilly says.

  I nod.

  “Wish I was there with you.”

  I am crying so hard, such buckets of rain, I am frightened by it, like it’s a medical problem that’ll bleed me dead if I don’t control it. I’m glad Lilly is not here with me. I’m glad nobody is here with me.

  It’s Pauly’s voice I hear now.

  “Everybody knows you’re in there, Oak. They’re all talking about you like you’re me. Don’t want that now, do ya?”

  I feel myself smile. Crying and smiling, which strikes me as Pauly enough. “Thrice now, Pauly. This is thrice I’ve had to tell you to leave me alone. Thrice.”

  “Come with?”

  I shake my head.

  “Okay then. We’ll be you. Me and Lilly, we’ll be you. Everybody will know that.”

  Why are they lingering so long out there?

  “Wanna hear it now?” he says very softly.

  I shake my head adamantly.

  “There’s no messin’ here, Oak. It’s the best thing I ever did. Not just the best poem. The best thing I ever did.”

  Still, there is no way. There is simply no way.

  “Did you write it down?”

  “Ya.”

  “Okay. Throw it in,” I say. “Will you do that for us, Pauly? That’s the thing. She would love it. I know she would love it and I love that she would love it. When the time comes, you throw it in with her.”

  Pauly agrees. I hang up.

  Finally, finally, the procession gets itself started again, and I walk to the window behind the curtain and watch nearly every face I have ever known as they walk along, following the casket car carrying the body of Ophelia Lennon. Up to the hill where they bury all the librarians and poetry of Whitechurch.

  Sacreds

  IT’S ALL DARK, AND it’s all quiet, in a way that is more than just the old after-hours feeling. It always gets dark at night, and it always gets quiet, even on Saturday eventually, but weekend quiet has a feel to it like it isn’t noise, but you can definitely sense something is going on. I don’t get that feeling now. It’s quiet-quiet as I pass the burger and donut and pie places, and as I pass Chuck’s International Auto Parts, and as I pass the Laundromat. I love this quiet. I stop there at the dead center, the still, unbeating heart of my petrified northern town. I spread my fingers for the cold, watch my breath curl slowly, more like smoke than steam, and I smell the crystal, night smell that is the purest thing about Whitechurch.

  There is nothing at all still happening in this town at this moment and the thought brings an immense peace to me. Only then do I realize that I’ve been at something other than peace.

  The empty coffee shop below my apartment, with its mocha fog aroma to lay me down and no people to mess it up, is now the most welcoming of thoughts as I come up on home.

  “What are you doing out walking at this hour?” Lilly asks.

  My heart rate is sent jackrabbitty. “Shit, Lilly,” I say, putting a hand over my chest and spluttering like a horse through my lips.

  She is sitting on the concrete step in front of the shop. “You do a lot of that now. Walking around. You trying to get someplace, my Oakley?”
/>   I stare at her, lean toward her as if I just cannot make out what she is saying, even though I can make it out just fine. “If you weren’t haunting my doorstep in the middle of the night, this wouldn’t be an issue.”

  She grins up at me, like she knows everything, whether or not there is anything to know.

  “I thought you had a date anyway,” I say, taking a seat beside her.

  “Jeez, now it’s your turn. Shut up, will you?”

  “Why, what’s so wrong?”

  “Oh, well, where to begin? Pauly spying on me, that’s one. Then, there’s you and your new restlessness giving me chills. And finally I’m out having a cup of tea with this strange boy who I’m thinking, okay, Lilly, he’s cute, right, got the mystery thing going for him and all, and it turns out he is so gay he cannot even speak to me once it’s just the two of us.”

  I’m laughing before she’s even finished. The story makes me happier than I’ve been in a while and reminds me, again, that I’ve not been as happy as I thought.

  “Go ahead, laugh. I’m like, forcing questions on him and he just keeps grunting, until finally he asks me if Adam is seeing anybody. Ya, he keeps going back and washing his clean clothes every week just to hang out at the ’mat.”

  I reach over and squeeze her hand, while we both laugh. “Finally,” she says, “I just stopped walking to see if he’d mind—seeing as he was supposed to be walking me home and all. He never even slowed down. Far as I know he’s still out there, walking in the dark someplace. The bum.”

  “Well, you can be a kind of intimidating babe, Lilly. Maybe you owe him an apology. Maybe he wasn’t even gay till he got alone with you.”

  She turns to me. “Shut up, boy. Aren’t you going to invite me upstairs for a drink?”

  I stand right up. “Not unless you mean to be drinking with my old man.”

  “Thought your old man didn’t drink anymore.”

  “That’s a filthy rumor. Anyway, for you he’d make an exception.”