An Imperfect Librarian (14 page)

“You don't need to be an electrician to understand my meaning. You only need to be a man, right, Carl?”

“For now, I'm not thinking about a woman for the hearth or the heart. I simply want to enjoy my first summer on the island.”

Cyril piles more food on my plate. “You'll be blowed up like a harbour tomcod,” he says to me. I hold out my glass for a refill of the wine. Blowed up and pickled. Must be all the salt beef in the jigg's dinner.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

T
HE KING E. LIBRARY GOES
into hibernation for July and August. Edith and Henry leave for summer vacation. The Reading Room might as well have white sheets thrown over the furniture. Henry will be relieved to know he didn't miss anything important. Work is tolerable because the library is air-conditioned. If it wasn't, I'd fall asleep at my desk reading reports about information system design. There's no time for reading reports on weekends at Cliffhead. We finish painting the rowboat after we plant her garden and before we tackle the job of widening the trail beyond the meadow. The garden fence needs to be repaired to keep out the lettuce-loving animals. The soil needs more lime. We build a sifter out of leftover chicken wire and some boards to remove the large stones. I shovel. Norah sifts through the soil. I promise to help with her catalogue on rainy days but there are none.

I borrow a library book on astronomy to guide our sky gazing. We don't use it much because we're too exhausted for anything but sleep by the time we're in the peak of the
house. We take advantage of the long days to be outside until nine or ten o'clock. The dogs wake us in the morning not long after the sun comes up. We spend the day at the cove, meadow, pond, around the garden, in the woods or by the barn. The first thing we do when we come inside is take a shower together to wash away the sweat, smoke and salt from our skin. It's the best part of the day – worth getting dirty for.

Norah doesn't invite me to Cliffhead on weekdays. The routine is Friday to Sunday night then back to work Monday morning. I don't usually visit without letting her know I'm coming. This time is different because it's her birthday. She kept it a secret but the database didn't.

The morning drags on. Not long after lunch, I stop by the flower shop to pick up the roses. The florist piles them into my arms. “Sixteen red, sixteen yellow, sixteen pink. Lucky woman,” she says.

“Lucky man, you mean.”

She stares at me. “Sorry. I assumed–”

“No, you're right. I mean I'm a lucky man.”

She smiles.

I visit the delicatessen for picnic food, the liquor store for champagne, the ice cream shop for a cake engineered to stay frozen up to two hours out of the freezer. I roll down the car windows, turn the stereo on high and head to Cliffhead with the warm wind blowing in through the open windows.

I pull up to my usual spot by the barn. That fact that his vintage Jaguar is parked there makes it less usual. I leave the birthday celebration in the back seat. The dogs are nowhere in sight, the house is locked, the barn empty, the cove deserted. I run up the trail towards the meadow in my office clothes during one of the hottest days on record, dodging the roots and rocks under my feet, almost falling, almost suffocating. Two or three times, I stop to bend over. I rest my hands on my knees and wait
till my heartbeat slows down.

I take a shortcut through bushes and trees that scratch at my face and neck. I scramble through the thickets, push branches out of my path and hop over muddy puddles. The pond is calm, rowing conditions ideal. The three dogs are swimming after the boat. He's wearing a hat over his bald head. She's wearing her hair down. He rows smoothly and quickly. The dogs will soon pick up my scent if they don't drown before they reach the shore. I take the same route back, not as fast, not with the same lightness. I drive directly to my basement flat. It's cool enough in there to keep a cake frozen and roses fresh. That might be useful if I hadn't thrown the lot in the garbage when I stopped for petrol.

“How was your week?” I ask her two days later.

“The usual. Pass me an extra garbage bag, please.”

I'm helping her gather fly-ridden, part-rotted, salt-baked strips of seaweed to use as garden fertilizer. The dogs poke their noses in the slime left on the beach rock when I peel off a layer of seaweed.

“I meant to ask you about the photos in your study. Who's the boy with the light hair, the one your father has his arm around?”

“The photo on the shelf with my father and the boy?” Norah says. “Francis Hickey. He was one of my father's pupils.”

“Like Walter?”

“Yes. Except that Will preferred Francis over Walter, over all the boys, over his own daughter. No matter what Francis did, he did it better than anyone else. My father loved him. He left his entire collection to Francis, including the Crimson Hexagon.”

“That was generous of him.”

“Will suffered a lot in the years before he died. His diabetes was out of control. His mind and eyesight were failing. If it wasn't for Francis and Walter, I don't know what I would have
done. Walter read to him. Francis worked on his collection, listing everything, annotating the items.”

I sit next to her on a piece of driftwood. “Why was your father collecting this material in the first place?”

“Because that's what you do when you're a collector. There's an incredible excitement always pushing you to reach the boundary of the collection. Often it's infinite or unattainable. That's what makes it frustrating and compelling at the same time. It's something to be passionate about.”

“Or obsessive.”

“It's no different than someone who decides he's going to scale a high mountain. He does that, then he sees a higher mountain and he puts all his energy into reaching the top of it. Then he sees another one and so on and so on. That was Will. It made for a difficult life. But that's the price you pay when you're really passionate about something And the collecting was only a small part of it. He had to organize, catalogue and transcribe most of it. The originals had to be preserved. If that wasn't enough, then he had to write about it in his book,
The Emerging Voice of Newfoundland.
Another time, it was
A History of Reading and Writing in Early Newfoundland.
The title changed every week.”

“Were you collecting along with him?”

“Not while he was alive. Will, Walter and Francis had their no-girls-allowed club. Reminds me of the History Department. I don't want to think about that. It's too depressing. Come on!” She pulls me to my feet then drags me towards the waves.

“Stop. It's too cold. We'll get wet,” I tell her.

I reach my arms around her back and legs to try to lift her in the air. I lose my balance then stumble onto the rocks, laughing. She takes off her shoes and socks. I do the same. We roll up the legs of our trousers then wade in the water holding hands. It's painfully cold. I jump back out and pull her with me.

“Come on,” she says. “You'll get used to it.”

We walk from one end of the cove to the other in water up past our calves then past our knees. Later, before the daylight blue surrenders to black, we sit on a piece of board washed up on the beach in the yellow glow of the bonfire with the smell of seaweed on our hands and smoke on our clothes. Sparks shoot out. The heat is intense. The backs of the minke whales rise and fall not far from shore. The gulls dive then swoop up with fish tails hanging from their beaks. Behind us, way up on top of the cliff, her house watches over us. The fire crackles and pops. We stare into it with no more than a comfortable silence between us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

N
ORAH MAKES A CONFIDENT BET
that she can teach me to swim by the end of the summer. I'm confident she'll lose her bet. “Swimming is natural: like making love,” she says.

I've had six weeks of lessons and I've swallowed as many litres of pond water. Even the dogs are laughing at me behind my back. I'd be better off in a swimming pool or in any water where there's an actual bottom. I don't care if it's concrete, sandy or rocky. Anything but boggy. It would also help if Folio would go with the other dogs instead of swimming around me. Norah says Labrador retrievers make the best seeing-eye and water-rescue dogs. I wonder what that says about me.

She coaches me from the shore. “Hold your head above the water.”

I practice gripping the boulder with only one hand. “Are you talking to me or Folio?” My feet touch the bog – or is it something furry rotting at the bottom? A carcass of a moose
floated to the surface in June. Norah said the people from Wildlife took it away. How do they know there isn't a second or a third carcass? I could be floating in a graveyard for moose. I kick my legs while I hold on with one hand. Norah is laughing.

“This is entertain–” I mean to say,
This is entertainment for you, isn't it?
I swallow water on
tain
then cough up the other words. I move to the shallow side where I can touch the boggy bottom. “Rather have my head underwater than my feet in this guck,” I shout.

She wraps her arms around her knees and hugs them to her chest. The straw hat hides her face from the sun and from my view. “There are some pockets of quicksand. Not too many. You should be safe,” she says.

I run out of the water. Folio swims like mad to keep up with me. I grab a towel then wrap it around my waist. “What's so funny?” I ask.

She rummages through the backpack of supplies then pulls out a bottle of wine and uncorks it. “Nothing,” she says. She holds out a glass to me. “Glass of wine? Some cheese and bread?”

I shake my head and finish drying off. “Do I have anything to do with nothing?”

“I was laughing because you believed me. There's no quicksand, Carl.”

“I knew that. I was worried about the sharks.”

She takes a gulp of wine then gapes at me. “Are you serious?”

“See? You're as gullible as I am.” I put on my shoes then go to the bushes for a pee. When I come back, I watch Folio chasing after flies near the edge of the water. I lie on the blanket and reach out my hand to rest it on Norah's back. The strip of sand bordered by bushes and shrubs is barely wide enough for
the two of us. “Do you ever come here with Francis?”

She doesn't say anything. She shifts forward so that my hand is no longer on her back.

“I was just wondering, since he was such a close friend of the family.”

She lays an empty glass in the sand, lies back on the blanket and covers her face with her hat. “I don't want to talk for now. I'm taking my siesta.”

The clouds move in to give us shade. I turn on my side to face her. I trace an imaginary line along her warm, smooth legs then run my hand up the inside of her thigh. I slide my hand under her swimsuit and squeeze her breast. She turns to face me. While we kiss, she pulls down the straps of her suit over her chest, hips, knees then feet. I pull her naked body against me.

Folio disappears in search of shade or because she doesn't want to listen to the heavy breathing. She reappears later when we're lying quietly on the blanket. The lop on the pond hitting off the rowboat is the only sound. Norah lies with an arm and leg stretched across my body.

Folio drops a wet tennis ball near my face. I raise my head off the blanket and throw it into the pond. She darts off then comes back in an instant and shakes water over us. Norah squeals and sits up on the blanket.

We put on our clothes and pack up our supplies. I throw Folio's ball in the boat and she jumps in after it. Norah pushes off then joins me on the centre seat. I row with one oar. She rows with the other. The breeze is shy so we make good progress with little effort. Folio sits in the front to scout for birds. We round the point and watch for the shallow spots where hidden boulders might scrape off the bottom of the boat. When we're almost to the beaver's house, we stop to rest. Norah splashes water over her face then flicks some at me. Folio barks
and the boat tips to the side.

“That's enough,” she says. “Let's go to the beaver's house.”

The mound of grey sticks and mud is larger up close than from the other end of the small pond. Norah holds the oars while I move up front next to Folio so I can grab hold of a boulder. “There's no smoke coming out of the chimney. There mustn't be anyone home.”

She lays the oars in the spine of the boat and throws the anchor overboard. “Don't be silly,” she says. “It's too warm for a fire today.”

We change places. She climbs out of the boat onto a boulder near the shore then dives into the water. Folio bites at the drops that fly into the boat. I count the seconds, wondering how long someone can hold their breath. I lean over one side but I don't see her. I lean over the other and there's still no sign. I can't save her if I don't know how to swim. I lean over the other side again. There's a splash followed by her laugh. She climbs back onto the boulder then into the boat.

“You're a naughty, mischievous girl,” I tell her.

“Bold, saucy, a know-it-all and whatever else you want me to be.”

I wrap a towel over her shoulders. The boat rocks. “Do you think it's a good idea to be drinking and swimming under water?”

“Don't be on my case, please. Did you see the beaver?”

I lean forward to kiss her. “No beavers, only a siren who rose from the depths to nearly capsize the boat.”

She rubs her head with the towel to dry her hair. “Beavers can be troublesome. They chop down trees, divert rivers, pollute the water. You don't want to get giardia.”

I run my fingers along the contours of her face. “Common symptoms?”

“Growing a big fat tail.”

“Like a siren?”

“Like a beaver,” she says.