by Jon Cohen
Now Ronnie showed her what he was holding behind his back. It was an old hardcover book, worn to pieces from reading. There was a feather bookmarking out of the top of it, like the feather in Robin Hood’s cap. Olive couldn’t remember loaning a book to Ronald Wilmarth.
“I stole it,” said Ronnie.
“Stole it?”
“Twenty-seven and a half years ago, when I was a kid, I stole this book. When you were looking the other way. In my dream last night? Dean, he called my name. And when I jumped awake this book fell off the shelf at the foot of my bed. And this feather was on it.”
Ronnie placed the book carefully on the desk. Olive squinted at it. “Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Wonderful book. One of the best ever written.” Then she peered over her bifocals in stern librarian fashion. “And you stole this? This was your first crime?”
“That is correct, yes, ma’am,” Ronnie replied in his humblest whisper. Even at a whisper his voice echoed about the walls of Pratt Library. Every move he made in this old marble building echoed back at him like a finger, pointing. “My first crime. And I am here to make amends.”
Oh my, thought Olive. This is all so stunningly interesting. Stu Giptner, she wanted to shout, do you see the importance of books? This Wilmarth has been possessed by a book. “Why didn’t you just sign it out, Ronnie?”
“My criminal nature, Miss Perkins.”
“I see. And you’ve led a life of crime ever since?”
“I have done things, yes. But the point is, Dean has specifically—”
“Paid you a visit and left his angel-feather bookmark and here you are.”
“Yeah!”
As people too often do, Ronnie had confused guilt with crime. Obviously, this was not a man to whom you could sensibly suggest, Ronnie, you were off eating a hamburger. You did not get drunk and bludgeon your friend in a snowy field. Maybe she should hand him an edifying copy of Crime and Punishment.
Olive examined the feather. The fact-based librarian in her—and amateur birder—wanted to set him straight. The feather was from a red-tailed hawk. Not an angel, but a rather common Pennsylvania mountain hawk. But Ronnie was too far along in his personal narrative. Ronnie needed what he needed. Oriana needed what she needed. And I need what I need, Olive thought.
“So what should I do?” asked Ronnie.
Olive was a survivor and a ruthless pragmatist. Living alone, a rural spinster, she made good use of whatever fortune or misfortune dropped in her path.
Last week, out of hunting season, a fat turkey had crossed her wooded lawn and she shot it. When dinner walks by, you eat it. The crumpled ten-dollar bill she found in the gutter outside the library last month? She did not go to the lost-and-found at town hall. She kept it. If this discombobulated Wilmarth needs to put on a hair shirt, Olive thought, that is very useful to Pratt Library.
“Ronnie,” she said. “You must do exactly what Dean Jeffers and the magic feather are telling you to do. Yes, you must make amends.”
He leaned in. “How?”
“It won’t be easy.”
“Good.”
“And it will be prolonged.”
“Good.”
“And it is possible you will contract rabies.”
“Absolutely, yes.” Then, “Rabies?”
Olive stood up, came around the circulation desk and placed a finger on the center of his chest, tapping his breastbone as she spoke.
“You, Ronald Wilmarth, through the agency of Dean Jeffers, are going to work off your debt. The library fine for a book overdue twenty-seven and a half years is no small matter.”
Ronnie punched his fist into his palm and grinned. “All right! Fair’s fair!”
Oh, I’m going to work you hard, Ronnie, Olive thought. Shameless of me, to take advantage of your gullible good nature, but what’s an old librarian to do? I must seize the day—or in this case, seize the Ronnie—because the building inspectors are due for their annual inspection, and this time no amount of bluster and begging would ward them off. Forward movement was imperative, and no volunteers had stepped up. Libraries were low on people’s list of concerns these days.
“Ronnie, this place is in terrible shape, from the shitter to the shingles.”
Ronnie blushed. “Yes, ma’am, I gotcha. I understand. I can fix just about anything and everything. Drywall, plumbing, roofing. Shitters.”
“I have no money to buy materials.”
He just shook his head. “You let Ronnie worry about materials, ma’am. I got a barn full of stuff.”
“Now, understand we can’t use stolen items, Ronnie.” She heard a pipe gurgle and a shingle slide off the roof. She dropped to a whisper. “Unless we are absolutely forced to.”
“You mentioned rabies, Miss Perkins...”
Muffled growls and yips in the ceiling above their heads. Olive turned and pointed at the ragged hole in the nonfiction row. A sharp, whiskered nose appeared and vanished. Olive scowled. “I don’t know precisely that they have rabies. But they are rabidly present and I rabidly wish their removal.”
Ronnie lit up and was already undoing his tie. “I’m absolute hell on raccoons!”
He lurched forward, bumping a bookshelf. Olive snatched hold of the tail of his suit coat. “I don’t want you to be hell on them, Ronald. This is not the apocalypse, dear. Just trap them and let them go in the forest.”
Ronnie reached down and picked up a book that had fallen when he’d bumped the shelf. It was The Sibley Guide to Birds. He slid it back into its spot, then together he and Olive went off to see if there was a stepladder in the storeroom so he could get a better look at the raccoon hole in the ceiling.
9
When Amanda went to check on Harry Crane early in the morning, he was gone. The tree house felt empty, like he was not just gone, but gone gone—that he’d changed his mind and he’d be staying down in Scranton. Everything was too neat. The cot perfectly made, the fire in the potbelly stove extinguished and cold, the food she had brought him last night for this morning’s breakfast—cereal, powdered milk, a granola bar, apple—untouched.
Well, why would he stay? He was a grown man, it was a tree house, maybe his wife said too weird. Who knew how the mind of a federal bureaucrat worked? Maybe they’d bump into him in the woods while he was doing his clinometrics. Or maybe not.
Amanda had a small knot of disappointment in her belly, walking in the early-morning light back to the house. Harry Crane would’ve been a good thing for Oriana. Maybe he’d already been good enough, the short time that he had literally dropped in on them and laid claim to her forest.
Oriana had been itching to go to the tree house with Amanda, but Amanda had said no, Oriana needed to make herself a bag lunch and get ready for the class trip to the Steamtown train museum in Scranton. When Amanda got back, Oriana was pacing at the edge of the backyard.
“What do you mean, gone?” Oriana said.
“Not there, sweetie. Gone.”
“He must be out in the forest. Doing his job.”
“Maybe. But he sure did leave the place neat. Just saying, Oriana.”
Oriana wanted to ask: Had he read The Grum’s Ledger? Or taken it with him? He couldn’t just leave. It was all she could do not to run to the tree house and check for clues her mother would have missed. But Amanda could sense it and hovered like a prison guard. She got Oriana into the pickup and drove her to school.
Amanda worked a six-hour shift in the ER, then came back home to shower. She checked the tree house again, and even went to the old quarry trail to look for Harry Crane’s car. She could see where he’d parked it, and the tire tracks where he’d backed up the car and driven away.
I guess that’s that, she thought, and got in her truck and went off to have sex with Cliff Blair.
* * *
She’d slept with Cliff five times. It was now April, the encounters had begun in February—that is, eleven months A.D.
Life A.D. (After Dean as Amanda grimly thought of it) went something like this. Months one to three—bed was for crying in, not wanting to get out of, reaching over to Dean’s side and not finding him there. Bed was misery. Months three through six, bed was lonely and too big, but at least she could get in and out of it like a seminormal human being. Something began to change between months six and nine. When she sleepily reached over to Dean’s side expecting to find him there and he wasn’t, it began to piss her off. “Why aren’t you here to hold me, Dean? I want to be held.”
After month nine, it was clear. She wanted to be held—by somebody. It mortified and upset her, but it was undeniable. She needed a warm body. Bed was for sex and she was in a sexless bed. Sex was life and she needed to get a life. Amanda had a wicked case of widow-fatigue.
So what to do? She didn’t want to sleep with a doctor at the hospital. No way was she going to be the nurse who played doctor with a doctor. Besides, she didn’t like doctors as men. Indoor men—ugh. She liked outdoor guys, men with calloused hands and the wherewithal to cut a cord of wood or start a truck in a blizzard. She wasn’t some silly-ass, truck-posing gal in a country music song. Nope, she was the real deal. Mountains and trees and deer and lakes were what she knew and what she was.
So who was it going to be? There were a lot of outdoor men in New Milford and the other little towns that poked up in this part of the Endless Mountains. But oh brother, when you put on your fuck-goggles, well, you didn’t exactly see a male Shangri-La.
But, but, but—stop it, Amanda. It’s rural Pennsylvania, you make do. Because face it, after Dean, everything was going to be about making do.
So back in February, Amanda had been eating supper with Oriana at Green Gables, and she forced herself to look around, give New Milford’s finest a serious perusal. She was not unaware that the men were looking back. The EMT crews at the hospital had started to sniff around her, and now so were the men sitting around the bar at Green Gables. Okay, it’s been almost a year, start your engines. Amanda Jeffers is up for grabs.
Tom the bartender had been the first to approach, when she and Oriana sat in a booth eating an early supper at Green Gables. Since Dean’s death, Amanda made an effort to take Oriana out to eat every two weeks. They always ordered the same things: Oriana a grilled cheese and tomato, and the ice cream roll for dessert, Amanda the barley-sausage soup and a salad from the uninspired salad bar. She marveled at how pale the iceberg lettuce always was, as if it had been specially grown in a cave for blind albino salamanders. Well, you didn’t come to Green Gables for a gourmet feed, you came because it was amiable, and there was plenty of parking and it helped break up the lonesomes.
She looked up as Tom, smiling nervously, approached the booth. “On the house, Amanda,” he said, setting a draft Coors Light in front of her and a Pennsylvania Dutch root beer on Oriana’s paper place mat.
Oriana lifted her eyes from her book and grinned, waiting a beat for the official mom-okay before she reached for the frosty mug.
Amanda hesitated, then gave a nod.
She was wearing her hospital scrubs, not exactly sexy, but they sure did something for Tom, the way his eyes were busying around.
“Thanks a lot, Tom. What’s the occasion?”
Not a question to tax the brain, but Tom went blank and began to rub his bulging forearms nervously, drawing Amanda’s attention to them. I absolutely do not want those things wrapped around me in bed, she thought. They glistened. Lord—he rubs oil on himself. Worse, she detected an almondy scent. Dean had been muscular, but it was an earned, natural muscle, he didn’t make a fetish of his body. When Dean glistened, it was with honest sweat.
And something else was deeply unappealing about Tom—he wore his pants too tight, creating one more bulge she’d rather not see.
“No occasion. Just for. I don’t know, just for...” He stood there a flummoxed moment longer, shrugged, then retreated to the safety of his bar, the other guys flicking their eyes and hunching closer to their beers, feeling his pain.
None of them were exactly lucky with the ladies. Cliff Blair gave Amanda a quick look over his shoulder. Cliff had never found the right woman. And Stu there on Cliff’s left—Stu had found the wrong woman and was divorced. Ronnie was dating the bottle, and Tom had been going with Lisa Stark from up Montrose, but that seemed to have piddled out.
Lisa was a bodybuilder, too. Amanda once got a look at her muscled torso when Lisa came into the ER with a torn rotator cuff. Every ounce of body fat had been sweated out of her and replaced by thick veins and sinew.
“You using steroids, Lisa?” Amanda, clipboard in hand, was filling out Lisa’s history and physical, so she had to ask.
“Oh, yeah. Nothing dangerous, just enough to keep me toned.” Lisa’s unsettling voice would not have been out of place in the bass section of the Mount Zion Baptist Church men’s choir.
About a week after Tom the bartender had made his move, if you could call it that, Cliff’s battered pickup truck pulled in behind Amanda as she was filling up at the Pump N Pantry on Route 11. Well, not filling up, because she didn’t have that kind of money. Without Dean, she was really beginning to feel the pinch.
Studying Cliff as he got out of his truck, Amanda thought: Cliff Blair, hmm. She returned Cliff’s tip of the tractor cap with a small wave.
Oh, but look at you, Cliff. I simply cannot go to bed with a man who has such an abiding relationship with cow shit. Cliff was wearing his chore boots, and they were encrusted—not unreasonable since he mucked out stalls for a good part of his day. But there was cow shit caked on all four tires of his truck and smeared thick across the front bumper and headlights. The headlights, Cliff! Where do you park your truck at night—in the middle of your manure stack?
When he got closer, she could see the haze of dried brown on both elbows of his Carhartt work coat. He was such a nice guy, really decent, big and kind of handsome, but he was soaked through and through with cow. Whenever Cliff opened his mouth she half expected him to moo.
“Hey there, Amanda Jeffers.”
Now this was someone she’d gone to elementary and high school with. “Hey there, Clifford Blair.” He didn’t get it, that she was trying to tease him out of formality.
“Cold one today,” he said.
“How the cows laying, Cliff?”
He grinned as he stuck the gas nozzle into the side of his truck. “Been getting about two dozen eggs a day. Keeping me pretty good in omelets, you know. Big omelets.”
Cliff reminded himself not to stare at Amanda, so of course he got befuddled and stared harder at her, his mouth opening slightly at her powerful beauty.
“Sure, sure,” Amanda said. “Big omelets. I bet.” His teeth are nice, she thought. And he’s got all his hair. Wish he didn’t stare with those cow eyes.
“ER keeping you busy?” Cliff asked.
Amanda nodded. “Couple hunters from Scranton yesterday came in dinged-up pretty good. Shouldn’t mix beers and birdshot.”
“I hear you there. You wouldn’t get no dings with a Marlin 336.” Which was the deer-hunting rifle Cliff owned. Cliff didn’t mess with birds and small game. A man who tends thousand-pound cows is partial to a large target.
“No, a Marlin’ll do a person pretty good,” Amanda agreed. “Let’s see, what else? Oh. Fred Nils came in Wednesday carrying guess what in a cup of ice?”
“His finger.” Cliff chuckling when Amanda nodded. “Fred and his traps,” he said.
“Catches more fingers than he does muskrat.” She held up her hand and pointed to her fourth finger. “Just down to his first joint. Docs got it back on pretty good, though.”
“That’s fine, then,” Cliff said. “I’ll take a look at it next time I see him.”
They fl
icked eyes at each other and went their separate ways.
* * *
In desiring Amanda, Cliff was definitely following the herd. Dean Jeffers was a good guy who sometimes joined the fellas at Green Gables, and when he was alive not one man among them would have considered even glancing at Amanda.
No, let’s face it, Dean wasn’t just a good guy, he was an amazing guy, and in death practically deified. Dean the bowhunter, Dean who built his own house out of logs he milled himself, Dean’s perfect teeth and easy smile. Dean the strong. Tom with all his great big muscles? Dean had once arm wrestled him and smacked Tom’s hand down so hard and fast on the bar, it sounded like a pistol crack and dimpled the wood. And of course—and they all pondered this but never spoke of it—Dean the lover. Dean in bed with Amanda. Epic, Olympic-level coupling, right? When he imagined it, Cliff heard the wild sounds of the jungle.
Dean’s death had thrown them into turmoil. What had been a wistful sexual simmering at the back of their forbidden fantasies was now, almost a year later, chest-tightening, full-bore desire. Not that it mattered a whit. It was pathetic, really. Amanda barely acknowledged the nincompoops hunched around the bar other than to nod at them. Still, they turned into quivering teenagers every time she came into Green Gables with Oriana.
When she crossed the doorstep, they were struck dumb. Cliff, sitting among them, knew exactly what they acted like—cows. The door would open, and they’d turn their heads in unison and freeze, like livestock startling at a sudden noise.
Cliff’s mouth would go dry, and he’d turn away from the blaze of Amanda’s perfection and eyeball the other guys. Ronnie would gulp his beer down, medicinally. Stu would light his match but forget to bring it to his cigarette, sitting there like the Statue of Liberty grasping a teeny torch. Old Walter would chuckle and shake his head. Tom might actually drop the beer glass he was swabbing out in the sink. Oh yeah, Tom had shattered a few.
As she passed by the long oval of the walnut bar, Amanda would glance over and say, “How those beers going down, guys?” Something neutral like that. Oriana would not speak a word—her nose was always in a book.