Текст книги "The Red Tree"

Автор книги: Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

CHAPTER SIX

16 July 2008 (10:45 p.m.)

The sky was already beginning to turn the purplish gray shades of dawn before I finally managed to get to sleep “last night.” Though in my last entry I made much less of the three oak leaves I found on the bedroom floor than I made of “Pony” and the whole mess with Constance, as soon as I’d shut off the light and was lying there, waiting for the Ambien to kick in and send me tumbling away to whatever nightmare was waiting, I could hardly think about anything else. What I’d first accepted as just another – and rather humdrum – consequence of living here, next door to that tree and old Hobbamock’s sacrificial stomping grounds, seemed suddenly a threat, an insult, a gibe.

What the hell am I trying to say? The words are not coming to me easily tonight. I’m exhausted, and it’s been a long damn day. What I’m trying to say is that I began to seriously consider the possibility that Constance placed the leaves there, that there was nothing the least bit preternatural about their appearance.

And, so, I was suddenly back at the gaslighting scenario. I got angry, and I lay in bed, sweating, trying to find some way to absolve her, but kept coming back around to the things I’d written about parsimony and the provenance of “Pony.” I began to mull over the implications, that Constance might have visited the tree to get the leaves (though I can hardly rule out her having acquired them from a different red oak, possibly one she encountered on her recent trip into Foster, and that’s probably much more realistic). It was all I could do to stay in bed. I wantedto get dressed and march up those attic stairs and pound on her fucking door. I wanted to see the lookon her face when I confronted her and called her on pulling such a sick fucking joke at my expense.

I thought worse things, too. Furious, vengeful ruminations I’m not going to put down here.

The last time I remember looking at the digital clock beside my bed, it was sometime after five. And when I finally slept, there were the dreams. I might have written those down if I’d gotten to this entry before sunset, but I didn’t, and so I’ll either save them for next time or just let them go. Let them fade, and be forgotten.

As for Constance, I hardly saw her again today, and when I did, I mostly kept my mouth shut. She seems completely consumed in whatever it is she’s painting up there. Maybe meaningless sex with older women is her muse. I made no accusations, and she did nothing the least bit suspicious. I did ask her about her work, how it was going, on one of her trips down to the toilet. I was sitting on the living room sofa, trying to make my way through a story on snow leopards in the June issue of National Geographic. Her hands looked as though she’d given up on brushes; indeed, there was paint, mostly shades of green and blue, halfway to her elbows. There were also smears on her face.

“Do you know anything much about painting, Sarah?” she wanted to know, not a trace of condescension in her voice, and I admitted that I knew very little. She watched me a moment, then stared past me, and I couldn’t decide if she was trying to think what to say next, or if, maybe, she’d forgotten we were talking. That unfocused quality to her eyes, which I believe I noted after first meeting her, seemed more pronounced than usual. Her gaze seemed fixed on something far away, well beyond the walls of the house.

“You’re not familiar with František Kupka?” she asked, at last, and once more I admitted my ignorance. I asked her to please write the name down for me, so I could look it up online, so we could talk about the painter later. She seemed skeptical, and in a hurry to get back to work, but did as I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not really so much like Kupka, now that I think about it. He’s just the first thing came to mind.”

“Kupka. Is that Czech?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “Well, it was still eastern Bohemia when Kupka was born. Later, though, he went to Vienna, and eventually to France, of course. You might recognize some of his work, when you see it.” And she named a few of his paintings then, though the only one I can remember is “The Black Idol.”

“Do you ever miss having other writers to talk to?”

“No, not really,” I said. “Truthfully, I’ve never much cared for the company of other writers. I usually just get into arguments I don’t want to get into. Why? Do you miss having other painters around?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Excuse me, Sarah. I really should get back,” and Constance pointed at the ceiling.

“Of course,” I replied. “I don’t mean to keep you,” and without another word, she turned and disappeared down the hall again. I sat there listening to her footfalls, to the opening and closing of the attic door. I sat staring at the name she’d scribbled on an index card, and the aquamarine smudges her hands had left on the paper. Suddenly, it seemed utterly absurd, that I’d lain awake all night, entertaining notions that Constance was sneaking about trying to freak me out by putting oak leaves on my bedroom floor. Or, for that matter, that she’d written “Pony.”

Later, sometime after a bland lunch of tuna fish and saltines and beer, I went back to Dr. Harvey’s typescript, skipping ahead, only half conscious of what I was looking for there until I’d found it. Beginning on page 262, Harvey documents a number of instances in which those who have had encounters with “the red tree” have been visited afterwards by the appearance of its leaves:

Does the oak perhaps leave calling cards, meant to remind those who have visited it that they have been marked in some way? The pun was unintentional, but I shall let it stand. Does the oakleave calling cards. I have discovered a number of accounts that seem to indicate that at least some of those who’ve gone to the tree have later experienced the spontaneous manifestation of Quercus rubraleaves. The earliest such account goes all the way back to John Potter, fittingly, who in October 1710 wrote of the repeated appearance of “stupendous quantities” of such leaves, “gone red as blood and flame with autumn, and acorns, too,” appearing inside the house he’d built two years before. He recorded his wife’s alarm at the coming of the leaves, and also her consternation at having to repeatedly sweep them out of her home. Then, again, in the summer of 1712, Potter found his rooftop blanketed with “a heavy falling” of red oak leaves, though he claims he was unable to find even a single such leaf lying on the ground anywhere around the house. “The wind seemed unable to dislodge them, and they lay still.” I have even seen one of the leaves from the October ’10 manifestation preserved between the pages of his journal, where, I assume, he himself must have placed it. Potter also mentions an acquaintance from “Satuit” (Scituate) who, following a call on the Potters, found red oak leaves beneath both his bed and writing desk on several different occasions.

This is the earliest example of the leaves appearing a considerable distance from the tree, though it is hardly the last. I have so many newspaper accounts of such episodes that it would be tiresome for me to recount them all here (see Appendix B). Instead, I would call attention to two rather disturbing and exceptional cases.

Enter this under things I should have begun to wonder about long before now, but. here’s Harvey’s unfinished manuscript, yet there’s no sign anywhere of all these clippings and notes and such that he repeatedly mentions in the text. How is it, then, that the manuscript was saved, but the files on which the manuscript are based apparently were not? Did he destroy them before his suicide? Were they discarded or destroyed by someone else after his death, even though the manuscript itself was stashed away in the basement? Or are they still here in the house somewhere, so well hidden that I simply have not come across them? Admittedly, I have not searchedfor them, but I have, since coming here, had occasion to casually peer into almost every nook or cranny where they might have been sequestered. Then again, maybe I have been anything but thorough, and my bored rummaging has been too haphazard. Regardless, I’d love to see some of his sources, if only to confirm that they exist, and to discover to what degree Harvey might be selectively reporting these incidents, thereby distorting them, to suit his needs. But, as he was saying:

The first concerns British Anglican occultist, poet, and novelist Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), who, I will note, was briefly a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (along with such Edwardian luminaries as William Butler Yeats, Florence Farr, and Maud Gonne). Shortly after the publication of her third, and final, novel The Column of Dust(Methuen; London, 1909) and while at work on Mysticism: A Studyof the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness(Methuen; London, 1911—possibly the most renowned work in a very prolific life), Underhill received a long letter from Margaret Cropper, a close acquaintance who was traveling in New England. Cropper had heard tales of “the fearsome blood oak somewhere south of Foster, in Rhode Island,” and had even visited the tree for herself. The letter in question, which has been printed in the Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill(Longmans, Green and Co.; London, 1946, edited by Lucy Menzies), recounts a visit to the “old White [sic] farm,” and includes fairly accurate descriptions of the house, the tree, and the supposed altar stone. When the letter reached Underhill, the envelope also contained a single dried leaf, which she identified as having come from a red oak. However, only a few months later, Cropper returned to England, and Underhill notes that her friend had no memory of having sent one of the leaves to her friend. “Indeed, she found the strange tree most wholly repellent and wished to take nothing physical away from her encounter with it,” Underhill writes (ibid). The mystery was compounded when red oak leaves began to appear in Evelyn Underhill’s home with increasing regularity, and she writes of having found more than fifty of them, between the years 1909 (when the letter from Cropper arrived) and 1914, when the peculiar manifestations abruptly ceased. The leaves turned up throughout her home – beneath her bed, in a steamer trunk, in a box of correspondence that had gone unopened since June 1903, inside shoes and coat pockets, and, most bizarrely, once inside a can of plum pudding. Underhill describes the affair as “a botanical haunting, and a most unnerving, if ultimately harmless, affair.” The leaves were usually green and unwilted, though several of them “. wore the gaudy colours of autumn.” The case of Underhill’s “haunting” is also mentioned briefly in both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe History of Spiritualism(Vol. II, G. H. Doran; New York, 1926) and Slater Brown’sThe Heyday of Spiritualism(Hawthorn Books; New York, 1970).

The last instance of leafy manifestations which I will here discuss is surely one of the most grisly episodes associated with the red tree. And yet it is also one of the most obscure episodes in this mystery, and my only records of it, beyond the memory of locals I have interviewed, is recorded in a pair of short articles in the always dubious pages of the Fortean magazine Fate(which has, over the decades, noted the odd goings-on associated with the tree in a number of articles)—“The Vampire Tree” (January 1982) and “Rhode Island’s Killer Oak!” (October 1983) – both penned by the same author, Patrick Baumgartner (about whom I can learn nothing, and he may have never been more than a pseudonym employed by the magazine’s editors and/or staff writers).

To summarize, according to these two articles, on January 17, 1981, a man from nearby Rice City (just south of here), a goat farmer and cheesemaker named in Fate as George Farrell, went to the Blanchard farm on business. He knew of the tree’s strange reputation, and at some point on that day, he visited it in the company of one of the landowner’s sons (the son is, by the way, the current owner of the property, though he professes no recollection of Farrell or the events described in Fate). Farrell was reportedly disappointed by what seemed a perfectly ordinary oak, and to show his contempt for the local tall tales, used a pocketknife to carve his initials into the bark, above the altar stone. Three weeks later, so both articles report, Farrell’s goats began to give extremely bitter milk. In the weeks to follow, three of the animals began to waste and finally died. Both pieces (which differ very little, and almost amount to reprints of the same article twenty-two months apart) state that the animals were summarily autop sied by a veterinarian from Coventry, who discovered that the they were each missing a “considerable quantity of blood” and that “their udders were distended, and, when opened, it was discovered that they were filled with a dark viscous material that stank of rotting vegetable matter, but, more remarkably, with the undigested acorns and leaves of a Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra).” The January ’82 article states, “The acorns of this species of oak are notoriously bitter and astringent, though they are still eaten by deer and other wildlife. The bitter flavor of the acorns is the result of high levels of the polyphenol tannin.” The veterinarian in question is never named (not even a gender is provided), and I have been unable to find anyone in the area who can tell me who he or she might have been.

The articles state that Farrell was so “angry and disturbed” by the unexplainable deaths of his goats, that he visited the Blanchards again, this time with a hatchet and three cans of gasoline, “. prepared to put an end to the demonic oak.” Fortunately, less hysterical heads prevailed, however, and he was discouraged from seeking his revenge upon the tree. However, Baumgartner’s articles state that, in his efforts to calm the man, Blanchard agreed to remove the section of bark that the goat farmer had carved his initials into, and it was reportedly then delivered to Farrell, who is said to have had it blessed (!) by a Catholic priest before he burned it to ash (in a twist reminiscent of the infamous Rhode Island vampire “epidemic”). The ashes he then buried in a sealed tin box in consecrated earth, possibly in the Greenwood Cemetery in nearby Coventry. The articles both claim that the lid of the tin box was engraved with a cross. In my interviews with locals, I have heard several variants of the story of the poisoned goats, however, in true urban-legend fashion, the details never match, and it is always attributed to the ubiquitous “friend of a friend.” Moreover, I can find no record of a goat farmer and cheesemaker named “George Farrell,” though it is possible that his name was changed by the editors of Fate(who, so far, have not replied to my inquiries for more details on the case, assuming, of course, that their files contain any additional information).

Having transcribed all that, one thing that sort of leaps out at me is the surname of the possibly pseudonymous Fate“ journalist”– Baumgartner. Anyone with even a smattering of German will see what I mean, that Baumgartnertranslates to “tree gardener.” Odd that Harvey missed that; it certainly would have bolstered his assertion that the name was merely a nom de plume. Or, I don’t know, maybe he did catch it, but appreciated the wordplay too much to spoil it for those among his readers who’d get it on their own. Also, I wonder if I ask Blanchard about this George Farrell fellow, if he’d be any more forthcoming with me than he was with Dr. Harvey. That is, assuming that there’s something here to be forthcoming about. It all smacks of “witch trial” histrionics to me, and if not for mine and Constance’s lost picnic, that damning firsthand experience with the tree, I wouldn’t be disposed to believe a word of this, giving the tales in the typescript no more credence than I’ve given the stock-in-trade of supermarket tabloids – Elvis sightings, Nostradamus, Bible prophecies, women who claim to have been impregnated by Bigfoot, UFOs communicating via crop circles, astrology, the Bermuda Triangle, and so forth.

Oh, there’s quite a bit more here about all the attempts over the years to burn and cut down the tree, I just don’t feel like copying it. But there have been manyunsuccessful and aborted attacks upon the oak, it would seem. It strikes me as just shy of miraculous that the thing is still standing more than three centuries after the first word of it reached the ears of white men. You’d have thought, if nothing else, some bunch of teenagers would have cut it down and or something as a prank. Maybe I should not be so awed at the tree’s apparent wickedness as by its resilience. Then again, maybe they’re one and the same.

Bedtime, old lady. Put the spooks to rest.

July 18, 2008 (2:16 a.m.)

Have I mentioned the heat? I don’t generally whine about weather. I’ve never much seen the point, but Jesus fuck. I’m about a hairbreadth from breaking down and getting a little window unit AC of my own, stick it on the damn credit cards, and worry about it later, after I haven’tdied of heat prostration. The meteorologists say there are cooler days ahead, and I do hope they’re not just fucking with us.

Constance came down from the icy sanctum sanctorumof her garret this afternoon, as paint-stained as ever, but somewhat more talkative. I must admit, it was something of a relief, at least at first. My own company wears so goddamn thin. Even that of a flaky, temperamental artist is preferable, at this point. However, one of the first things she did was comment on the heat downstairs, and I briefly contemplated murdering her and hiding the body in the basement. Or taking it to the red oak, in hopes that Hobbamock the Narragansett demon might be pleased, take pity upon me, and grant a boon of cooler weather.

“You should come upstairs,” she said, and “You should ask me,” I replied.

Constance laughed, but did not proceed to invite me back to the attic. We sat on the living room floor for a while, talking and sweating, before moving to the kitchen table, which was even more cluttered than usual. She looked over a few pages of Dr. Harvey’s manuscript, offering no comment. We drank cold beer and nibbled at Spanish olives, whole-wheat crackers, and slices of Swiss cheese, because, lunchtime or no, we were both too hot for an actual meal.

“You know what it makes me think of?” she asked, and nodded at the window, nodding towards the tree. This was fifteen or twenty minutes after she’d returned the pages to the manuscript box, and it took me a moment to realize what she meant.

“No,” I replied and took another sip of my beer.

“It’s like something from Violet Venable’s awful garden in New Orleans. You know, in Suddenly, Last Summer.”

I forced myself to stare out the window, north towards the tree and the steely shimmer of Ramswool Pond, for a moment before answering her. “I think, technically, it was Sebastian’s garden. Mrs. Venable had merely become its caretaker after her son’s death.”

“Is thatwhat you think?” and now, suddenly, there was a trace of derisiveness in her voice, something verging on contempt. I looked at the tree again, at the high blue sky suspended above it, not a cloud in sight. The sun seemed to have robbed the entire world beyond the window of shadows, or even the potential for shadow. Given the topic at hand, it was impossible for me not to be reminded of Catherine Holly’s fevered description of the sun on the day of her cousin’s murder – a gigantic white bone that had caught fire in the Mediterranean sky.

“Is it?” Constance prodded.

“It’s too hot to argue with you about Tennessee Williams,” I told her.

“I didn’t know we were arguing, Sarah. I only thought we were having a conversation. I thought you might be getting lonely, down here all alone. I thought maybe you would appreciate someone to talk with.”

“Sebastian planted the garden,” I said. “It was Sebastian’s garden,” and she laughed and lit a cigarette.

“The garden, it’s a womb,” she said. “The green and, in the end, barren hell of Violet’s own womb, guarded by carnivorous plants. I mean, really, those pitcher plants and the Venus flytrap and whatever the hell else Violet was keeping in that miniature greenhouse, that garden within the garden, those plants she hand-fed – if that’s not the vagina dentata,I don’t know what would be.”

I turned away from the window and stared at Constance a moment or two before saying anything more. The smoke rising from her cigarette curled into a sort of spiral above her head.

“I tend to avoid conversations about vaginas with teeth,” I said, finally, and she laughed again and tapped ash into an empty saucer.

“So not a big fan of Freud?” she asked.

And, by this point, I was growing angry, what with the heat and the sunlight and the fact that Constance was clearly, for reasons known only to her, trying to pick a fight with me. Thinking back on what I said next, I’d like to believe it was something more than me being a cunt, that she had the embarrassment coming, whether or not it’s the truth of the matter.

“The vagina dentataisn’t a Freudian concept,” I replied. “I’m not sure Freud ever even addressed it, as that image runs counter to the whole Oedipal thing. Freud said that little boys are afraid that their mothers have been castrated, notthat their mothers’ vaginas have teeth.”

Check.

Constance glared at me and narrowed her hazy red-brown eyes, taking a long drag on her cigarette and then letting the smoke ooze slowly from her nostrils. I could tell that she was choosing the words that would form her retort with exquisite care. I glanced back to the window.

“What about our friend out there?” she asked. “You believe that old tree has teeth?”

Checkmate.

“You’d think it would fucking rain,” I said, and I suppose that can stand as a white flag of surrender, my refusal to acknowledge her question.

“Screw it,” Constance muttered, and I didn’t look at her, but I could hear her standing, could hear the legs of her chair scraping loudly across the floor as she pushed back from the table. “There are better ways than this to waste my time.” And when she’d gone, and the attic door had slammed shut, I sat alone and watched the red oak, pretending that I didn’t feel like itwas watching me.

July 18, 2008 (9:15 p.m.)

Home again, home again.

Home. Does that word, and the concept behind the term, retain any meaning whatsoever for me at this point? If not, how long since it has? Did Amanda and I ever have a home? Any of the women I lived with before Amanda, did wehave homes? Was that shitty little house I shared with my parents, back in the dim, primeval wilds of Mayberry, was thathome? I can hardly look at this old farmhouse of Squire Blanchard’s and see it as anything more than a place where I am presently sleeping, eating, writing this idiot journal, hiding from New York and the ruins of my career, and so forth.

The house I share with Ms. Constance Hopkins. A few nights ago I fucked her, and briefly thought I’d found some sort of fulfillment or satiety or surfeit, whatever. This morning, I came very goddamn near to murdering her. I don’t know whatshe’s doing up there, in the chilly seclusion of her ivory garret. But unless she has contrived some daring new oil-painting technique that involves hammers, power tools, and stomping about as loudly as possible, I’m left to conclude she’s just trying to get on my nerves.

Late this morning, after washing my breakfast dishes, I was trying to read, nothing important, nothing of any consequence, nothing I was really even interested in reading, but still, I wastrying to read. In this house where I also live, and for which I also pay rent, whether it is or is not a “home.” Finally, I got the broom and banged the handle sharply against the ceiling several times. She responded with about fifteen minutes of complete and utter silence, after which, the noise resumed anew, with the addition of Very Loud Music (it might have been the Pogues, but I’m really not sure, as I could only clearly make out the bass lines). Maybe the right thing to do would have been to knock on her door and politely ask her to hold it down. But, I know myself well enough to know that what I would have done, instead, is poundon her door and orderher to lay the hell off before I strangled her. A fight would have ensued.

So, I got in the car and drove up the road to the Tyler library in Moosup. I’m not sure what effect my retreat might have had on Constance. Did she see it as a victory, having chased me from the house? Or, if her objective was to bedevil me, did I rob her of the satisfaction? I don’t care,not really. I’m only thinking out loud. I realize that, either way, the trip to the library merely delayed some inevitable confrontation. If she’s spoiling for a showdown, I cannot hope to avoid it indefinitely. Sooner or later, tomorrow or the next day, I’ll find the proverbial end of my proverbial short fuse and tell her to lay the hell off or die. Jesus, how many times haveI, directly or indirectly, threatened the bitch’s life in this entry? When they find her rotting corpse in the basement, this will be the document that sends me to the chair. Or to the room where the lethal injections are administered. Does Rhode Island have the death penalty? I should hope so. I’d hate to actually serve a life sentence for the death of Constance Hopkins.

Really, Judge. Honest injun. The noisy little clit-tease had it coming.

So, yeah. The library. The woman at the front desk commented that she hadn’t seen me in a while and wanted to know if maybe I’d been working on a new book. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, right? I said something inoffensive, I can’t recall what, found an anthology of New England writing (essays, scary Puritan sermons, short stories, etc.) and did my best to hide among the shelves. At least the place is air-conditioned, so it was an escape from the heat, which shows no signs of letting up, regardless of what the weathermen are telling us. I found a reasonably comfortable armchair, and proceeded to read an excerpt from Thoreau’s The Maine Woods(1864). I’ve never read much Thoreau, beyond Walden,of course, which I think I “had” to read for some college lit class or another. Anyway, this excerpt from The Maine Woodssort of sucked me in, and I sat there for more than an hour, reading. At one point, I got up and photocopied a page, to get a passage that had struck a chord. I think I’m going to include part of it here, though I’d not planned to do so when I sat down and started typing. Reading the following lines by Thoreau, I could not help but see them in light of Dr. Harvey’s manuscript and the red tree:

Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, – to be the dwelling of man, we say, – so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, – not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, – no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, – the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, – to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where ourwild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husband-men planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, – thatmy body might, – but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! – Think of our life in nature, – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actualworld! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Whoare we? where are we?

Is this a fraction of the tree’s apparent mystery, that it exists, essentially, out of time, and so, in some sense, out of sync with the world that surrounds it? Having been spared (or successfully having resisted) the tripartite ravages of deforestation, agriculture, and human population that so quickly reshaped the geography of New England, has the red oak become – I don’t know – an embittered survivor? Does it hold within it resentful memories of an earlier state of this land, Thoreau’s elder “. Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.” I am well enough aware what shaky ground I am on, seeming to ascribe the potential for acrimony to a plant,to something that, even now, I could not believe is in any way sentient.

And yet, have I not previously, and with all fucking sincerity, called the red tree wicked? Am I trying to have my cake, and eat it, too?

This afternoon, sitting there in the AC and the reasonably comfortable armchair, reading Thoreau, I was interrupted by the librarian who’d seen me come in. She’s the sort of woman who puts me in mind of egrets and herons – tall and thin and frail, the skeleton beneath her skin seeming hardly more substantial than the hollow bones of wading birds. Maybe ten years my senior, and, admirably, she’s made no attempt to hide the gray in her hair, which, unfortunately, had been molded into some do that would have been out of style when I was still in high school. She was standing over me, holding the only book of mine anywhere on the library’s shelves (and I was surprised, back in May, to see even that one), a ten-year-old hardback of Silent Riots. The paper dust jacket was protected behind one of those crinkly, clear cellophane covers they put on library books. Both were somewhat tattered and had yellowed with time.