by Sam Starbuck
"Leather cover? You could do that?" he asked.
"Sure. It's not difficult."
"I think that wouldn't make it worth any less," he said. "Not to my dad, anyhow. Leather cover, that'd be something else. You do all that by next week?"
"I don't see why not. Longest wait is for the glue to dry."
"How much you charge for something like that?"
I studied the cover, already thinking about the work. Slice with a scalpel there, and there. Fresh white waxed twine for the new stitching, not too tight or it'd rip the paper. Maybe some reinforcement on the brittle pages.
"Tell you what, run down to Paula's when she opens up, get some of that leather she sells – here, these dimensions," I said, scribbling out rough measurements on a scrap of paper. "You pay for that and bring me some of that cheese you make in spring and we'll call it even."
"You sure about that?"
"It's really good cheese, Jacob."
He laughed. "When's Paula get in?"
"About an hour. Come on upstairs, I'll make you some of these eggs."
"Nah, I got to make some deliveries. Bring you the leather this afternoon."
"Suit yourself," I said, putting the book in a desk drawer, behind the one functional lock in the entire building. "I'll be here all day."
He let himself out while I collected the basket of eggs and made my way upstairs. There was a small jar in the basket as well, packed with salted butter. I put a pan of water on to boil and cracked two eggs into a bowl, leaving the rest in the fridge. Fresh poached eggs and buttered toast are worth a wake-up call at seven in the morning any day of the week "but Sunday", as they say in Low Ferry.
After breakfast I opened the shop, not that there was anyone waiting, and settled down with the Farmer's Guide. I spent the better part of the day getting the cover off and delicately dissecting the segments of the text block, looking through each portion for ripped pages. Most of the twine used to stitch it together with was rotting. A really thorough job would mean picking out the stitches and re-sewing all of it, which took time and care. And there was no time like the present to start.
I was stitching merrily away, a pot of wheat paste at my elbow, when my silent customer slipped in again, right past me as I was working on a fiddly part of the book. I didn't dare look up until I'd finished, and by then he'd was nothing but a shadow behind a shelf.
I set the paper down carefully and checked the clock. Nearly three, which meant –
Even as I thought it, a crowd of students crashed into the shop, fresh from school and still carrying their backpacks.
"Hey!" I called, and most of them looked up. My customer did too, a sharp sudden movement. "Backpacks by the counter, you guys know the drill."
They rolled their eyes and piled their bags in an untidy heap, flocking around the magazines and comics. Among them was the boy who had questioned me the day before, rubbing his dark-haired head in consternation as he studied the newest arrivals. The children weren't interested readers, except for a few exiles who had more books than friends, but all of them lived for the day the comic books came in.
The little demons were learning economics, at least. I didn't know who had come up with the idea, but the children had discovered that if each of them bought a different comic, they only needed to buy one each – they could share them around at school or in the play-yard afterwards and read all the comics they pleased for a small price. The weekly negotiations over who would buy what were always very much in earnest.
While they were dickering over who got to buy what, and thus who had nominal ownership of which, my customer stalked behind the shelves until he had circled the children and was in the clear, with the children on his right flank and the door, an easy retreat, to his left. He stood there, indecisive, until desperation drove him out into the open and up to my counter.
He set the book down and offered me a small smile along with his cash (exact change) as I rang up the total. It was an odd amount, something I'd seen recently, and I looked at the book again.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Didn't you already buy this book?"
He looked surprised. "No, I bought another book."
"No, I'm sure it was this one," I insisted. "Was it defective?"
"No, it wasn't this book."
"Because if it was, you could return it. Weren't you satisfied with it? It didn't fall apart or something, did it? Was it inaccurate?"
"I – don't know," he confessed. "Actually, you gave me a different book instead."
"I did what?" I asked.
"There was a mix-up when..." he held his hand up to show Carmen's height. "The woman and girl came in. You gave me another book instead while you were dealing with her. I should have checked my bag. I don't want to return it," he added hurriedly. "I liked it."
"Did I overcharge you for it?"
"Oh, no, not really."
"What did I give you?"
"Greek myths. Ovid."
"One of these?" I asked, holding up a copy of Selected Myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The high school was using it for a literature course that fall.
"I didn't want to complain, it's just that my roof leaks. I don't blame you or anything," he added clumsily.
"I'm so sorry – here, take the book at my cost," I said, offering it to him.
"No, I'd really rather pay..."
"But it's my fault. Let me make it right with you," I said.
"I don't – " he cut off abruptly as several of the children swarmed around him, insinuating themselves against the counter so that I'd see them first when he left. He suddenly found himself engulfed in a sea of adolescents while trying to argue a point of pride with me. I felt a certain amount of pity for him.
"Please, I don't mind. I enjoyed it, so it doesn't matter," he insisted. He set the money on the counter and withdrew his hand, nearly elbowing one of the children in the nose as he did so. The boy from before had sidled up on his other side, comic books held tightly against his chest, and now he craned his head up and around the stranger's ribcage.
"Hello," said the boy with a curious look.
"Hello."
"You've moved into the cottage, haven't you? You buy a lot of books," the boy continued.
"Please, go first," the stranger said. The boy beamed at him and offered me his comic books, which meant all the other children began jockeying for place behind him. My customer withdrew again, back to the cookbooks, leaving his money and his book behind. There wasn't much for me to do but ring up the children as quickly as possible and break apart a scuffle that started when a boy grabbed the wrong bag and its rightful owner socked him in the arm.
When the last of them were gone he was still there, pretending to have been reading the backs of books the entire time. He waited another few minutes before he set a paperback down, carefully using his sleeve to rub his fingerprints off the slick cover, and returned to the counter.
"You should have gone first," I said. "They're impatient little beasts sometimes."
"I don't mind," he stammered. "May I have my book now?"
"Of course," I said, giving up on restarting our argument about payment. I offered him the book wrapped in a clear plastic bag, normally reserved for rainy weather or people with a lot to carry. "See? So you can make sure you have the right one this time."
He looked down at the title through the plastic. "Yes, I see," he said gravely, clearly uncertain whether or not I was joking.
"So you've moved into the cottage at The Pines?" I asked, as the ancient cash register spat out a receipt. I tore it off and offered it to him. He shoved it in a pocket absently.
"Word travels fast."
"Get used to it. I'm Christopher," I added, offering him my hand.
"Lucas," he replied, hesitating briefly before shaking.
"Staying the winter?" I asked, while he shifted uneasily and glanced around.
"Probably through spring at least."
"You working in town?"
"Not really," he said
abruptly. "Thank you – have a nice day."
He was out the door and down the steps before I could get another reply out.
***
It is a natural human urge to settle in certain formations, which can be repeated in a village of five thousand even more easily than a city of five million. The village is merely the city stripped to its basic component parts, after all: places to gather, places to buy and sell, places to live, places to play. The church, the shops, the houses, the park.
Low Ferry's major road was a two-lane blacktop lined with shops, the only reliably-plowed street in the winter. During the summer the cheap asphalt sometimes melted and stuck to peoples' shoes. My shop, and my little apartment above it, stood about midway down the road in the heart of our bustling retail district which consisted of my bookshop, the hardware store, the cafe -- which was also a general store and sold homemade jam in summer -- a department store with a grocer's built into one side of it, and two antique shops that closed when the tourist season ended each year. At the northern end of the road, before it shot off in search of a freeway to join, there stood a small squat wooden church which was attended by nearly everyone who lived in the village.
Spreading out from the shops in a vaguely oval pattern were shady streets with pleasant grass-yarded houses, none more than a decent half-hour's walk from the center of town. The two lower schools stood on one side of town and the high school on the other, closer to the manicured sports field. To a child it must have seemed pretty tedious, spending eighteen years with the same forty or fifty faces. Or maybe it was reassuring. I went to school in Chicago, where the faces changed from year to year.
Beyond the village, the access roads stretched between hills and fields, threading around farms and across a river that flowed under the highway to the southeast, and routinely flooded the roads during the spring thaw.
Off to the west, one of the roads led to an old abandoned farm, rotting for lack of use. Before the sodden and crumbling farmhouse, however, the road split and the smaller fork wound up a small hill covered in pine trees. In the shade of The Pines was a little cottage, probably built by the man who once built and abandoned the farmhouse. It was situated so that the road curled around the house, the front door facing south-west and the kitchen windows predominantly east to catch the sunrise in the winter. The hill and trees shielded the western sunset, making for early darkness even when the days were long. It's difficult to find a reason anyone would have built the cottage or a reason anyone would stay there, since a wide two miles of field lay between the cottage and the nearest edge of the village. In the winter it would be cut off without a four-wheel-drive or a long cold hike on snowshoes, and it had no advantage in its isolation.
In addition, the roof leaked.
Paula, who ran the hardware store, was the second person to ask me about Lucas. She came over the day after I was commissioned to repair the Farmer's Guide, bringing with her a mallet and a stylus set I'd asked to borrow so I could emboss the new leather cover. I capped the scalpel I was using, set it somewhere I'd remember to find it later, and joined her at the counter.
"Tools for the master," she said, passing them over. "Whaddaya give me for them?"
"My undying gratitude?"
"Can I eat gratitude?"
"Fine, grab a few magazines," I said, waving a hand at the rack while I looked through the box of oddly-shaped implements.
"So have you heard about the new boy in town?" she asked, studying the golf magazines. There weren't any golf courses within forty miles, but we had lots of wide open fields.
"Lucas?" I asked.
"Is that his name? He didn't introduce himself," she said. She thumbed through one of them and put it back. "Just gave me a list and asked where he could find it all."
"What did he buy?"
"Aluminum, some three-quarter nails, all-weather caulking, shingles. Do you know what he's doing here?"
"Patching a roof, from the evidence."
"Funny, Christopher. You know what I mean. Who is he?"
"Well, if you wanted intel in return for the loan of your tools, you should have said so."
"I'll pay for the magazines," she sighed.
"Good. Man's got to earn a living somehow." I closed the lid of the box and set it on the workbench. "His name is Lucas, he's living at the cottage out at The Pines, and he has a leaky roof. Aside from that, he's terrified of children and direct questions."
"Terrified of everything."
"He seems nice enough."
"Sort of a gawky kid, isn't he?"
"We can't all be grace and charm like you are," I answered. She snickered.
"He made me nervous," she continued. "Skulking around the shelves, always half-behind something."
I accepted the magazines she'd chosen and rang them up. "I don't think he has any intention of stealing anything, if that's what you're asking. He paid at my place, anyway."
"Unless he's casing us for a midnight attack."
"Yes, Low Ferry is a prime target for hardened criminals," I drawled. "He'll score a life-changing forty-seven dollars from my cash register."
"You never know."
"He's a stranger here. I'm sure he's just feeling his way."
"Maybe. Anyway, he won't get far without a hammer or a caulk-gun."
"I imagine he might have a hammer."
"The man had to buy nails, Christopher."
"All right, maybe not. Why didn't you try to sell him one?"
"Well, I'm not sure. I didn't think about it until later. I told you, I was unnerved."
"Find it in yourself to be re-nerved." I offered her the magazines with her change on top. "Listen, why don't you package up a caulk-gun and a hammer and I'll take them out to him. It's a long walk into town. I don't think he has a bicycle."
"Wouldn't work very well out on that rutty old dirt road," she sniffed. "You haven't got a bicycle either."
"I don't mind the walk."
"You're either too unselfish or too curious for your own good."
"I can't be both?" I asked with a smile. She made a face, but twenty minutes later she had returned with a metal bucket. Inside was a strange, skeletal contraption I took to be the caulk-gun, a generic cheap hammer, and a pair of wicked-looking snips for the sheet aluminum.
"What's the bucket for?" I asked.
"In case he gives up on the repairs," she replied with a grin.
It was nearly dark at that point and I didn't particularly enjoy the idea of walking down a rutted dirt road or crossing a pitted field with only the moon to guide me, so I put the bucket near the front door to remind me in the morning. I guessed that a single night wouldn't make any difference, even if the smell of early-autumn rain was already on the wind.
I felt differently the next day, when the heavens opened at around seven in the morning and the rain came pelting down. I didn't mind a little wet, personally, but it was true that I liked my wet to stay firmly outside and away from my books. If I were a young man with a leaking roof, I would be frustrated not to have the proper tools.