Book of Mercy (5 page)
“I think it’s going to be cool having a baby around,” Star said. “You and Sam are going to be the best parents, I just know it.”
Antigone envied the child’s confidence, something she was far from feeling. She inhaled the scent of pine. Her mind, which earlier had been turning in dozens of circles within circles, was slowing. Soon it would be incapable of even a half flip. Her hands felt heavy. Her neck and shoulders could hardly support her head. She leaned back against the rock and thought of babies.
There were so many decisions to make, so many chances to do the wrong thing. Parenting was a minefield, and she felt she was wearing big clodhopper boots. Antigone realized, for the first time, how vulnerable parents were, how powerless they were in the face of love.
“It’s crazy, but I already feel like I’d do anything for this baby,” she said.
Star pulled her knobby knees up under her chin. “Mama says babies turn your life upside down, so it’s a good thing they’re cute.”
Star had been firmly in that cute stage when Earthly Sims, a single mother, brought her baby daughter to town. As Antigone held Baby Star, Earthly, fresh from a divorce and desperately needing to start over, dug into a mushroom quiche at the O. Henry Café counter and talked. About leaving her job as a lawyer at the ACLU in Atlanta; about splitting from her traitorous husband, Chester, a once brilliant ACLU litigator but now corporate hack “who got too many people out of messes they didn’t deserve to be gotten out of”; and about her sister who worked at the mill in Mercy.
“I’m not disillusioned,” Earthly had said with a big sigh. “I’m just tired of the law, of Atlanta, of Chester. I need a break.”
Antigone had inherited a nice chunk of Mercy from a never-met, never-married uncle who noted in his will that “a child with a disadvantage needs the money more than the rest of my worthless family.” The bequest, on the western edge of town, included three abandoned storefronts; a long-closed restaurant named after the short story writer O. Henry; a garage, complete with a rusted hydraulic lift, broken pumps, and empty fuel tanks; a two-story farmhouse; and across the road, two hundred acres of undeveloped land.
Talking with Earthly, Antigone immediately saw the possibilities. One of the vacant storefronts stood right beside the café; Earthly had the connection at the mill to get all the seconds they wanted. Before Earthly left the café, she and Antigone had devised a plan to open a textile outlet called The Great Cover Up. As it turned out, Earthly was good at retail, and she liked managing inventory and making change, which suited her silent partner just fine. That was nearly ten years ago. Antigone had watched Star grow up.
“What do you think of Ryder?” asked Antigone.
“He’s okay as strays go,” Star said.
“Strays?”
“Mama says you pick up strays like us.” Antigone started to deny it, but Star immediately reassured her, “Oh, it’s a good thing. People need a place.”
Antigone said, “I don’t think of you as a stray.”
“Of course not. Not now. Now we’re family.” Star threw her a smile.
“Yes, family,” Antigone said.
Peace settled on Antigone and Star. They listened to the birds quarrel with a squirrel and chase away a hawk. They nearly slid into sleep until a ray of sun caught the reflection of an object across the pond and ricocheted the glare to their eyes.
“What’s that?” Star pointed.
“What?” Antigone mumbled.
“That.”
“Probably just a piece of trash.”
The child rose to investigate, pushing through the waist-high foliage, and Antigone followed. As they neared the tree, Antigone’s heart picked up speed. Her steps slowed.
“It’s a book,” Star said in amazement.
“Great, this is all I need,” Antigone muttered.
The book was tucked in a place where it shouldn’t have been, a crevice in the bark, not well hidden as wild things go. Reaching up, standing on tippy toes, Star tugged at the book until it came free, toppling on her head. They carried the book back and, using the boulder as a table, studied it.
Antigone traced the gold embossed letters on the brown cover with her finger and sang the alphabet song in her head. The book was old, weathered from use and the elements, with metal tips to protect its corners. It was the gold corners that had caught the sun’s eye. She opened the book and, reluctantly, painstakingly, began to decipher some of the words. Sun washed over the pages, making them glaringly white; she wished she had her blue filter, a tool she used to calm the glare and make the shapes easier to discern. Still, her brain would never work like other people’s. It would never reliably translate the images in front of her eyes into meaningful language. In her world of swirling serifs, everything moved.
“It’s hard for you, isn’t it?” Star asked.
Antigone’s hands jerked. “What do you mean?”
“The words.”
“There are some things people don’t want others to know, Star.”
“Am I being nosy?” Star pushed a tangle of braids out of her eyes and bit her lip. “Mama says I got to be careful with my gift. That I’m prone to getting into other people’s business. I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
Antigone studied the words on the page. She came across a “b” or was it a “d”? Her brain automatically launched one of her coping mechanisms. The “b” is shaped like a bed with a headboard, she reminded herself.
“I hate books,” she said, knowing it wasn’t true.
When Antigone’s parents first learned that she couldn’t read, they didn’t believe the doctor. “What do you mean,” they said, “she transposes letters? She has to unscramble words before she can read them?” This was devastating to two people who were scholars, people who lived by word and equation. Antigone’s mother, Annaliese, was an international authority on the classics and ancient civilizations, and her father, Henry, was a theoretical mathematician at a small private college in Massachusetts. It was incomprehensible that a child of theirs could possess a brain wired for confusion.
Antigone’s parents reacted to her disability as they did to any mathematical or academic puzzle. They read every book and journal article published on dyslexia. They looked for ways to cure, circumvent, and cope with the problem. They pressured the school to allow Antigone to take oral tests whenever possible, or at least to have the teacher read the questions aloud to her. From the beginning, Antigone had begged to be read to. She saw her parents always reading and studying, and she wanted to be a part of that world. So they read to her: children’s books, classics, textbooks, academic journals. They read and discovered that once Antigone heard something, it was with her for life. Her recall ability amazed her forgetful, often distracted parents, who left a trail of Post-It notes in their wake. Annaliese, who usually cooked with her nose stuck in a book, thought nothing of peeling labels off cans in the pantry to mark her place. Antigone grew up constantly surprised by the contents of mysterious canned goods.
“One of my first memories is of my father instructing me never, under any circumstances, to write in a book,” Antigone said, almost to herself.
“I got in trouble once for writing in a book,” Star said. “Whew, was Mama mad.”
“I think I could have robbed a convenience store, stolen a car for joyriding, and come off with a lighter sentence than if I had taken a ballpoint pen to
Babbitt.”
“What’s a Babbitt?”
“A book you’ll probably have to read some time.”
What a disappointment she must have been to her parents, what an enigma. Antigone vowed that she would never be disappointed in her child—no matter what she could or could not do. She would teach her daughter the alphabet song, a necessity for both the dyslexic and the reader. Reading was a formidable job for Antigone. She never knew when a word, a little no-account word like “the,” would send her all the way back to the start of a sentence. It seemed unfair, but Antigone had learned to live with injustice. When she was a child, she would throw down a book in disgust, crawl onto her father’s lap, and burrow into his embrace. “It’s so unfair,” she’d cry. “It’s so easy for everybody else.”
Her father always replied, “Who said life was fair?”
Antigone shook off her reverie and realized that Star was staring at her. “I thought everyone liked books,” Star said. “I love books.”
“Why?”
“They’re magic! They make me stronger and smarter. They’re fun. They make me feel good.”
When she was Star’s age, books hadn’t made Antigone feel stronger. And, books were definitely not fun. She didn’t know of anything that made her feel dumber than a book.
“This is an old book,” Star whispered, stroking the cover. “Sometimes old things feel like they have a life of their own. Don’t you think?”
Star’s words unnerved Antigone, who already believed the literary world was out to get her. She bent over the book. The words crawled toward logic and sensibility. It was a dance of frustration that she had been doing all of her life: decipher two words, stumble on one; two steps forward, one step back.
Suddenly, infuriated, she flung the book high into the air, startling Fancy the deer, which leaped into the woods. Star jumped and yelped. Antigone watched in awe as the pages spread open like wings and flapped. For a moment, she believed the book would take flight. She was shocked when it dropped into the pond and sank. Antigone gasped in horror. What would her parents think? “I’ve drowned a book.”
But then the book popped to the surface, bobbing like a cork. A survivor. Antigone and Star looked at each other.
Antigone flung out her hand. “
That
is my life with the written word.”
T
HAT NIGHT
S
TAR WROTE
in her diary as the pond book stood propped open on the window sill, its pages drying in the breeze. “We found the book today, just like in my vision. Poor Antigone. I wanted to tell her everything is going to be okay. But I’m not sure of that yet. I only know: this is the beginning.”
Do You Offer Combat Pay?
“I
’D MAKE A LOUSY
spy,” Nancy Sandhart told her good friend Antigone Brown. “The waiting, the secrecy, the deception. I’m not built for a life of subterfuge. I have a delicate system.”
Nancy jumped as William placed two plates of tofu burgers and sweet potato fries in front of them. She and Antigone sat in one of the booths in the O. Henry Café. Nancy liked the café because it was book-friendly. Bookshelves marched up to the ceiling and around the door, some sagging under the weight of the books and literati litter Antigone’s uncle had collected. A letter from Mark Twain complaining about his fuel bill; Flannery O’Connor’s calendar; a spinner belonging to Hemingway—people said Mr. Brown was a sucker for anything allegedly literary. Personally, Nancy didn’t care if they were authentic or not, and neither did Antigone.
Nancy bit into her meatless burger, dabbed at her coral pink lips with a paper napkin, and said, “Now,
you’ve
got what it takes.”
Antigone laughed.
Nancy pointed a fry at her friend. “You’ve got Mata Hari nerves of steel. I know some people nearly had a fit when your uncle left you all this property.” She popped the fry into her mouth. “Prime Mercy real estate. Arthur Crump was royally pissed when you refused to sell everything to him.”
“Arthur
does
like to bulldoze.”
“People
and
dirt. But you stood up to him. I could never have done that.” Nancy was the librarian at the Mercy High School Media Center, although she preferred the word library. She believed every child who walked through the detectors at the library door was a time bomb waiting to blow up in her face.
Everyone had heard the stories: teachers being beaten, shot, or raped by grudge-holding, gun-toting, love-sick, stressed-out students. It was a violent world, and children brought it to school with them, secreted away in backpacks, pockets, and hearts.
Nancy did not like being a disciplinarian. She cringed inside every time she ejected a girl for talking too loudly or a boy for roughhousing with another student. Who knew when she’d meet them again—after school perhaps in a deserted hall or waiting by her car, tapping one of her windshield wipers, broken and bent, against the palm of a hand? Nancy would prefer a library without people.
At the counter, the boy, Ryder, was hunched over a strawberry milkshake. She hoped her friend was safe taking in such a strange child. In Nancy’s opinion, there were no children who were not strange.
She eyed Ryder again. She bet he knew his way around a windshield wiper.
T
HE BELL OVER THE
café door announced the arrival of a family of four, and Nancy’s mind tumbled with thoughts: school bells, for whom the bell tolls, ding dong the wicked witch is dead. The witch, in Nancy’s fantasy, looked uncannily like Irene Crump. “Irene is driving me crazy,” she told Antigone.
“What’s she up to now?” Antigone asked, swiping an orange fry through a puddle of ketchup. Irene often hit local businesses to support the Study Club’s pet projects. Nancy knew Sam and Antigone didn’t mind contributing to good causes like the fire department and the food pantry, but Antigone hated the way Irene went about it. Irene didn’t ask for help; she expected it.
“Book banning.”
Antigone froze before the fry reached her mouth. “Excuse me?”
“Just your ordinary, everyday censorship. And I’m her henchman, er, henchwoman.”
“Explain.”
“Irene’s been volunteering in the library this summer. I thought it was nice of her.”
“Irene is never nice.”
“So I’m learning. She snooped around in closets and drawers. Found my cigarette stashes. And she was awfully curious about how we select our books. Then a few weeks ago, she came in with The List.”
“The List?”
“Of books. ‘The Mercy Study Club doesn’t believe these books are truly suitable material for young, impressionable minds,’ she told me.”
“Impressionable minds,” Antigone said.
“Irene strongly suggested that I pull the books from the shelves.”
“You didn’t.”
Nancy had begun folding and refolding her napkin with the coral pink stain. “Irene can be really scary.”
“What’s she planning to do—burn them?”
“Oh no! I just have them stacked in a locked closet. I really thought this was going to be a onetime thing. I thought in a few weeks Irene would settle down and I could put the books back on the shelves. But yesterday she came in with another list.”
“You’ve got to tell someone, Nance,” Antigone said. “Superintendent Mitchell.”
Nancy gasped. “I can’t possibly. Irene will squeal on me—my cigarette stashes and the smoking in the rest room. She practically said so.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“Irene calls it cooperation.”
“She would.” Antigone bit into her burger.
Nancy balled up her paper napkin, then immediately smoothed it out, only to repeat the process. She ached for a cigarette. There was no smoking in the vegetarian restaurant; Antigone said it ruined the ambiance when you were trying to push healthy choices. If they were sitting in the rocking chairs on Antigone’s big wraparound porch, she could have lit up. Antigone even kept an ashtray on the porch just for Nancy.
“This is not a little thing, Nance,” Antigone said softly, leaning closer. “This is real un-American, Nazi-loving censorship shit.”
“Irene says it’s for the good of the children, that we need to protect them.”
“I think we need to protect children from people like Irene. What does Bob think about all this?” Nancy’s husband Bob was a plumber, a self-employed businessman who took no guff from anyone and set his hours to fit with his passion for fishing. In the canine world, he was a basset hound married to a Chihuahua. He never got excited, while she lived in a perpetual state of angst.
“You know Bob,” Nancy said. “He thinks I’m making a mountain out of molehill. He was never a big reader. Whenever I complain that working in public education is not an easy job, he says, ‘So quit. You don’t need that job.’ He doesn’t see the big picture.”
“Which is?”
“I love books! This is all I ever wanted to be, Antigone. A librarian. Working in a nice, quiet place, surrounded with the things I love. How did this all get to be so hard?”
Nancy told Antigone about an old friend, a fellow librarian in Florida. Jean Knott was Nancy Sandhart’s hero. She worked in a public library where guerilla tactics were not unheard of. Jean had patrons who yelled at her, who intentionally lost books they didn’t agree with in philosophy, who even returned books they found offensive half-burned and charred claiming the books accidentally fell into the barbecue as they were reading.
Antigone dropped her tofu burger. “Lord, don’t tell my parents about that stuff; they’d have a stroke.”
“Jean has this customer she calls Dr. Dirty Words,” Nancy leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He operates on the books with a tiny knife. Jean finds little piles of words on the tables in the stacks, tiny mounds of even tinier ‘hells’, ‘shits’, ‘damns’, ‘fucks’, ‘breasts’, ‘penises’.”
“Can’t she take his library card away?”
“She has. But he keeps sneaking in and she keeps throwing him out. He just waves to her with his bloody arthritic fingers—he shakes a lot and cuts himself—then drives off in an old Cadillac. He lost his driver’s license years ago.”
“Determined old cuss,” Antigone said with a note of near admiration in her voice. She swung her legs up on the booth and eased her back against the wall. “Have you talked to Jean about Irene and her club? What does she think you ought to do?”
“She’s gone through a lot of book challenges. They can be just awful, Antigone. Everybody gets mixed up in them: the patrons, the politicians, the staff. It turns the whole town upside down. Complaints. Harassment. Threats. People snubbed her on the street. She even had her tires slashed.”
“Scary stuff.”
“The last one was a classic,
To Kill a Mockingbird.
That went on for months. Jean lost weight and considered early retirement. She’s been that town’s librarian for nearly forty years. The town got a ton of publicity, which was not great for tourism. Then the ACLU arrived and threatened to make an example of the county commissioners. They quickly changed their tune and returned the book to circulation.”
“So the good guys won,” Antigone smiled.
Nancy wasn’t so sure about that. She recalled her friend’s words over the phone: “My husband said, ‘Good, now life can get back to normal.’ But, Nancy, it doesn’t. Once you’ve heard their voices making threats in the night . . . So I pretend that everything is the same, that I never saw their hatred or heard their venom, that they never made me feel unsafe and afraid, that they never made me cry. Nancy, I’ve learned to be a diplomat, when all I ever wanted to be was a librarian.”
N
ANCY FINISHED HER TOFU
burger then vacuumed up the remains of her chocolate Malted Magi with her straw. “What if that happened here in Mercy? All that craziness and publicity and fighting. I’m not brave like you and Jean. I can’t stand up to Irene and her club. I can’t even stand up to a bunch of kids. I’m a nervous wreck. I can’t concentrate; I can’t sleep. I’m fighting with Bob over the silliest things.”
Stress made Nancy feel uglier than usual. She’d begun smoking in her teens because she thought it would make her look cool, transform her from some beanpole with a long nose and stumbling feet into an elegant, sophisticated woman. In her imaginary metamorphosis, she would emerge as Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
So much for that. In reality, she more resembled the wet, straggly cat Holly Golightly saves in the alley in the end, an unattractive critter few people could love.
But Bob did love her, she thought, watching Antigone rub her stomach. He was a silly man, but a faithful one. And when the doctor said they’d never have children, it was Bob who shrugged his shoulders, reached for her hand, and gave her a lopsided grin.
“I shouldn’t be so hard on Bob,” she said.
“It’s Irene you ought to kick in the ass. God, but I hate when people push other folks around just because they can.”
“Irene and her friends do a lot of good for this town.”
“That doesn’t give her a license to run your life.”
Nancy began folding and unfolding her napkin again. She
really
wanted a cigarette. “I thought maybe you could do something.”
“Me?”
“You always know what to do,” Nancy said. “You stand up to people all the time. Remember when the city council went berserk over the deer farm?”
“Called it a tourist trap.”
“But you opened it anyway, and tourists started coming to Mercy, to the farm and the café and The Great Cover Up.”
Antigone nodded. “And the world didn’t end. The city council changed its mind when the tax dollars started rolling in.”
“That’s what I mean. You just do stuff and you don’t care what they think. Like your driving. You take road trips all alone at a moment’s notice. I wish I had the nerve to just drive off.”
“Nance.”
Nancy rushed on, pluck-pluck-plucking her ravaged napkin. “They say your uncle was like that, holding on to his little corner of Mercy, doing what he pleased. I don’t know how to be that way. I don’t push back very well, Antigone.”
Antigone leaned over and calmed Nancy’s nervous fingers with a touch of her own hand. “I’ll think of something.”