Rain Village (6 page)

“That is a long story, little girl,” she said, and I saw a wave of something pass over her.
Something bad,
I thought, but did not know what to say.

“Where did you live before?”

“A place called Rain Village,” she said. “A sad place, sadder than a willow weeping over a country pond. It’s where I was born and raised.”

“Rain Village?”

“It was strange there, Tessa.” She seemed far away from me then. “A place where rain shimmered onto the river and water never reflected the sky above it. A place where leaves and pine needles fell into your hair and stuck to the bottom of your feet, and everyone had a secret. It rained all the time, hiding us away from the world.”

I stared at her, transfixed. “Why did you leave?”

“I just did,” she said. “You can always leave. Always. That’s why you should save your pennies, little girl. You know what I used to do to hide money from my parents? And then, later, from everyone else?”

I shook my head.

“I sewed it into my skirts and shirts,” she said. “In the hems. But in your case we can just keep a box here, okay? So whenever you’re ready to get the hell out of here, you’ll have your money with you. In the meantime, why don’t we celebrate with a glass of champagne?”

“Okay,” I said, though I was sure she was joking. When she disappeared and came back a moment later with a bubbling glass in each hand and a big silver box tucked under one arm, I just drank it all in and laughed.

Rain Village,
I thought later, and imagined leaves clinging to my hair, soaked through with rain.

I immersed myself in Mary and that library, and the books surrounding me. During the day I learned to shelve and check out and check in, and I soaked in the stories Mary read to me, listened carefully as she recommended books to the farmers who lined up at the library doors each morning. Though I couldn’t read very well yet, soon I, too, could recommend books to people based on the way they moved through the room, the way they looked at me as they approached the front desk. I gave my mother a dollar every Friday, and my own two dollars a month piled up, along with the money Mary gave me from what she earned telling fortunes and selling herbs. I was always conscious of the money I had sitting in that silver box: it seemed to chain me to a mysterious but thrilling future, one far away from Oakley, Kansas.

I worked every day from morning till evening, and then at night I sneaked my way into the fields. With a book spread before me I struggled with those marks that covered the pages until early in the morning when my family started to rise. I lay back in the field, the corn swaying all around me, above my head, and the moon shining through and lighting up the pages. The more I studied those pages, the more different everything seemed: the cornhusks pulled back to reveal rows of
shiny jewel-like kernels, and the moon marked out the shapes of the corn and the stalks, spooky and wonderful against the sky.

Every day I brought in a list of questions and problems for Mary, and with one glance at the page I was reading she could erase all the roughness and all the awkwardness I’d brought to it when I was struggling in the fields alone. Her voice was rich and low, humming in my ear, and everything she saw she saw differently from any way I had thought to see it before. The stories and words stayed with me, overlaid my mind and heart and protected me from the world outside the library, my world back home. As time passed and the words on the page came into focus for me, I’d sometimes open a book and forget to breathe, I’d slide out of myself so completely. I’d jump up, astonished and gasping for breath, to see Mary looking over at me from her desk, smiling curiously. I would drop a book from my hands sometimes, feeling its beating heart under my fingers.

I loved the cigarette smoke that coiled above the library desk, the shapes carved into the wood, and the way Mary sat bent over some book, her right arm tossed to the side, her fingers playing with the crinkling paper of her cigarette. Though on most days the men were lying in wait for Mary out front and the women practically formed a line behind the library stacks, pretending to look through books while anxiously checking the door Mary was sitting behind with someone else, there were other days when we had that long stretch of afternoon all to ourselves, to read or talk or play cards or just work to get all those books shelved before the next round of scholars and heartbroken women. Those days were heaven for me: I had a million books pulsing around me, and Mary, too, had story after story inside her, so vivid they pressed into the corners of the library, into every nook and cranny, and leaked out the windows that had been cracked open and were jammed crooked into their frames. I would wait for those moments when Mary would look
up and tell me a story, or read me some ravishing poem by Christina Rossetti or Robert Browning, or a tract on gardening, or a line about dreams, tulips, or Egyptian kings.

“Listen to this, Tessa,” she said once. “One of my favorites.” Her face was pink, her hair blacker than I’d ever seen it. Happily, I set down the dictionary I was studying and stretched out on the wooden floor.

Mary held the gold-paged book with trembling hands.

“On either side the river lie
long fields of barley and of rye,
that clothe the wold and meet the sky;
and thro’ the field the road runs by,
        to many-tower’d Camelot.”

I soaked the words in through my skin, breathed them in and out. I had never heard of Camelot, but all at once I pictured it: the river and rye, all tinged with blue, the magical place in the distance that all the workers turned to, dreaming. I imagined castles and towers like in the old stories Mary had read to me.

“And up and down the people go,
gazing where the lilies blow,
round an island there below,
        the island of Shalott.”

She smiled, making the words lilt and sing.

“Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
little breezes dusk and shiver,
thro’ the wave that runs for ever,
by the island in the river,
        flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
overlook a space of flowers,
and the silent isle imbowers,
        the Lady of Shalott.”

The words ran through my veins, seeped into me and made images appear all around me. I could have reached out and touched the willows and aspens, as light and soft as silk. I didn’t even know what the words meant, all of them, but I could
see
them, see the woman trapped in the island by the river, the garden outside. Suddenly I felt heartbroken.

The poem went on, and I watched the boats skimming down the river, the people walking by, the woman in the tower weaving and singing, cursed if she looks down at Camelot.

“Why can’t she look?” I asked suddenly, angrily, turning to Mary.

She looked up and shrugged. “She’ll be cursed,” she said. “Curses are funny things.”

I held my breath and listened.
Don’t look,
I thought.
Don’t look.
When Lancelot entered with his broad, clear brow and helmet, I held my breath.

“She left the web, she left the loom,
she made three paces thro’ the room,
she saw the water-lily bloom,
she saw the helmet and the plume,
        she look’d down to Camelot.”

“No!”
I called out, as, in the poem, the web flew out and mirror cracked. I covered my eyes.

The next thing I knew, Mary was closing the book and kneeling beside me. I peeked out and saw her shaking her head, marveling at me. “It’s not real,” she whispered. “It’s just a poem.”

I put down my hands, flushing with embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Don’t be.” And then she smiled down at me. The world went back to normal.

I breathed out in relief. “I hate Lancelot,” I said.

“Me too,” she said, laughing. “Now how about some tea?”

I remember those days like hot baths after days spent in the snow. Sometimes we’d just sit cross-legged on the floor, a picnic lunch spread around us, as she told me about the strawberry farmer and his mistress from town, or the boy who was engaged to two girls at once, or the post office station manager’s wife who was pregnant with a dairy farmer’s child. Mary knew every strange, clandestine thing that happened in Oakley. Not too much happened in Oakley outside these sordid affairs of the heart, though: no crimes of passion or big, earth-shattering events. The town was too small to attract the traveling shows that dotted the Midwest through the summers, and you’d have to travel all the way to Kansas City for anything worth seeing. Once, some boys in town got in trouble for defacing the scarecrows that rose out of the cornfields, and that caused more of a ruckus than anything else had in months.

Sometimes we were silent for hours at a time. I would read while Mary just sat there quietly, rolling her cigarettes or trying to organize the papers Mercy Library received each day, the copies of wedding licenses or birth certificates that we’d haul to the vast file cabinets downstairs.

“Why do we bother with this?” I asked once. “What does it matter?”

Mary ran her hands along the cabinets, until she found the right one. She slid it open and began leafing through scattered papers and folders. “Here,” she said finally, pulling out a few thick sheets of paper
as if she were a magician. “Some librarian before me filed this right after you were born,” she said. “Look. Tessa Riley, born to Lucas and Roberta Riley of Riley Farm.”

I stared down at the sheet of paper, the harsh, typed words. She flipped through the papers, showing me all of them.

“There are files for Matthew, Connor, and Geraldine, too, and Lucas and Roberta. Your whole family, right?”

I nodded. It was so strange to see our names laid out like that, as if our lives had enough precision to them that someone could type out the details like that—but there they were, their names next to mine.

“You never talk about them,” she said. “Why don’t you ask your sister and brothers to visit one day?”

I looked up at her, startled. “Oh, no,” I said. “No. Please don’t do that.” The idea of Geraldine or Matthew or Connor in Mercy Library seemed all wrong. I pictured them storming through the aisles, books crashing to the floor as they clomped past. I imagined the looks on their faces when they saw me drinking tea with herbs floating at the top.

Mary slipped the papers back in their folders and shut the drawer. “It was just an idea,” she said, flicking her finger against my arm. “So, no more Rileys here if we can help it. I’ll put a big sign in front that says they’re not allowed.”

I smiled, relieved, but sadder, much sadder than I had been before I’d seen my name in black type. Later, without Mary knowing, I went back and back to those papers, which almost tore in my shaking hands. I looked at the names of my parents and felt the most profound sense of longing and loss, though I barely recognized then that that was what it was: loss of the most heart-wrenching kind, despite the books raging with life around me, despite Mary and her kindness, her beautiful words and stories.

By and large, it was the men in Oakley who had begun reading books—bringing candles into their rooms late at night to read the
Canterbury Tales,
perusing Montaigne while sitting in tractors or on bales of hay. They loved coming into the library and showing Mary how they’d read the selections she’d made for them, telling her about their favorite parts and lines.

Women sought Mary out more shamefully, in whispers and with scarves pulled over their heads. Beatrice and Mrs. Adams were only two out of what must have been five hundred women who came to see Mary when I was there. In my first year of working at Mercy Library, I heard women confess to hating their children; to loving women instead of men; to cheating on husbands with all variety of other men, from farmhands to cousins to the traveling salesmen who sometimes appeared at our doors with cases full of perfume or makeup; to hating their lives, our town, and the fields that kept all of us wrapped around their fingers; and to desiring any number of things so strongly that they could barely eat or sleep or get through the house- or farmwork they saw pile in front of them each day.

Several months into my new working life, I was sitting on a small rocking chair near the table, struggling through a book called
Sister Carrie
that Mary had picked out for me, while Mary sat behind the desk with a deck of cards spread out in front of her. She played absentmindedly with her cigarette as I spat out each word, fitting my lips and mouth around them. The cards snapped as Mary shuffled them between each game. The day had been particularly grueling: we had talked to a woman having an affair with a boy half her age, despite her husband’s legendary temper. Mary seemed especially quiet, melancholy.

“Love, that’s all anyone asks about,” she said, sighing. “It’s pathetic.” We finished closing the library together, then walked out into the balmy spring night, down to the river that ran a mile or so behind the library. We stretched on the grass by the river.

She turned to me. “Have you had any boyfriends yet, Tessa?”

“Me?” I looked at her, truly astonished.

“Of course,” she said, winking.

I didn’t know what to say. “Have you ever been in love?” I asked, finally.

“Oh,” she said, a smile forming. “Yes. Not for a long time, a very long time, but yes.”

“What is it like? Who was he? Is he the man from the post office?”

But she hardly heard my questions. Her eyes closed; the sweat glistened on her brown face. The warmth of her skin seemed to radiate all around me. I crept up close to her and put my face next to hers.

She said finally, “No, his name was William. From Rain Village. His body was perfect, like a sculpture you’d see in a museum, and he was just made like that. He would walk around naked, very casually, as if it were the most natural thing and his body were above such things as shame or modesty. Like a child’s white hair. As if he didn’t even know it.”

She seemed far away from me then, and to be talking to herself as much as to me. I squinted up, following her gaze. I felt that if I concentrated hard enough, I too would see him—naked, walking like a cat.