The Girl on the Library Steps

by Brett Rutherford

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 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.

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”

I never saw her again.