by Brett Rutherford
Out I came from the double-door,
Out I came from the double-door,
arms full of
science-fiction adventures,
squinting to see the
steep steps downward,
and there she was,
rail-thin and shabby
like me,
goggle-eyed spectacles
owling up to the
library entrance.
She did not move. I
squeezed past
through the street
door to the leaf-blown sidewalk.
Only one book you need ever read,
her Pa told her. He slapped the Bible
against his knee, the leather binding
just like the strap he whipped her with.
Exultant
I flew through the double door.
I
swear it opened without my touching.
They
had let me into the open stacks —
I
had the principal’s note averring
that
I, a lowly third-grader
could read
at the 12th-grade level.
Hugged
to my chest were Goethe’s Faust,
the dreamt-of Dracula
at last,
and a tattered copy of Frankenstein.
and a tattered copy of Frankenstein.
And
there she stood, on the third step now.
One
of her shoes was not like the other.
Your cousin Gracie, she was a reader,
least till she got ideas and run away.
They found her dead, and pregnant.
Nobody here’d go to her funeral.
One
book, just one book this time,
a
thousand pages of delicious revenge.
Down
stairs I almost levitated,
the
book already open —
The Count of
Monte Cristo. Had I opened
the
double-glass door? I think I went
straight
through like a house-ghost. Step five
was where I nearly collided with her,
the
girl in the home-sewn blue calico dress,
her
bare arms a patchwork of bruises.
Your Pa found those comic books
your girl-friends loaned you. He says
they’re the Devil’s work. He burned them.
One
winter Saturday, Shakespeare in hand,
I
bellow, “Friends, Romans, countrymen!”
from
open page to the empty stairwell.
Oh,
she was there in December dark,
the
same dress, same mis-matched shoes.
Now
that I wore glasses, too,
our
vision connected in focus.
We
were on the seventh step.
She
stared at the book in my hand
and
trembled. I told her the story
of
Julius Caesar, then
hurried on.
You want a card, a library card?
Your teacher says you need it?
We’ll not have you there, unsupervised.
There might be Jews and Catholics.
Library card! Next thing you know
you got some card says you’re a Communist!
“Intelligences
vast, cool, and unsympathetic” —
I
rolled the words on my tongue as I left
the
library with The War of the Worlds.
Martians,
oh, let the Martians come!
And
here, on the uppermost step,
I
was nose to nose with the girl again.
I
could smell stern soap, and vinegar.
Her
blond hair was braided to strangulation.
I
held the door open to let her in.
She did not move. She trembled.
She did not move. She trembled.
“I
can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”
I
never saw her again.
