Harry's Trees

by Jon Cohen

  Olive said, “So you can’t pay me and keep the lights and heat on, have I got that right, Stu?” Shrewd with a nickel, that Stu Giptner—she should never have recommended The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to him when he had that book report back in seventh grade. She knew that Stu had his eye on nurturing the demise of Pratt Library, which sat on a choice piece of land right in the middle of town. She’d caught him out back more than once, pacing off the lot like a mortician measuring a corpse for a coffin.

  “I’m sorry to say, but that’s exactly right, Olive,” Stu replied. He looked about as sorry as a vulture.

  “Then just keep the heat and lights on. I don’t need the town’s money.” But she did need the library, more than food or oxygen. And the children needed books, too, whether their parents understood it or not, and so did the old folks up in the hills who still had the wit and capacity to crack open a book even if these fools on town council never read anything more complicated than Twitter twaddle on their cell phones.

  So with a bang of Stu’s gavel—God did he love the officious sound of that gavel—Olive Perkins went from being a grossly underpaid librarian to the library’s sole volunteer. The ghost who kept the library lights burning. The alteration in her lifestyle was not that significant. She bought her sweaters at Goodwill, heated her house with wood, made her own bread, and was grateful for extra venison and turkey from her neighbors during hunting season. And like everyone else, she had a big Kenmore freezer that she filled with wild strawberries and blackberries, and pale-fleshed sunnies she caught down at Acre Lake.

  “A fool and an ass,” Olive grumbled, meaning Stu Giptner, thinking back on that meeting as she turned on the library lights. The old fluorescent tubes flickered noncommittally, then buzzed on. Ick, what a glare. She glared back at them. “Fluorescent lights,” she said. “Whoever invented the fluorescent lightbulb should be tossed into the Susquehanna.”

  Being a librarian, and therefore an inveterate looker-upper of facts, Olive had a sudden need to know who invented the fluorescent lightbulb. She went straight to the reference section without hanging up her coat and reached for F in the 1980 twenty-two volume edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, the last major acquisition she had made for the library. She certainly wasn’t going to use Wikipedia on the library’s single computer, not if she could help it.

  She sat down on a step stool and fingered through the pages of the encyclopedia, pausing at “Florence, Italy” to read about the Duomo, and Michelangelo’s David. Ten minutes later she suddenly remembered her original task and, chiding herself, flipped briskly through the Fl’s to “Fluorescent Lighting.”

  “Peter Cooper Hewitt.” She read out loud in little bursts. “‘Hewitt built on the mid-nineteenth-century work of physicist Julius Plucker and glassblower Heinrich Geissler.’”

  Olive raised her eyes to a flickering bulb way up in the deep pitch of the peeling ceiling. “Geissler. Got a Geissler down in Maplewood Cemetery. No. No, that’s Geisczler. Arnie Geisczler who raised goats. Now there was an ornery bastard. Ornery Arnie and his ornery goats.” Her eyes cut back to the encyclopedia. “‘Hewitt developed mercury-filled tubes in the late 1890s.’ Mmm-hmm. Yes. Oh dear—he joined up with Westinghouse. Well, that was the end of you, Mr. Hewitt. You sold your soul and they ate up your good name and now nobody remembers you.”

  She slid F back in its slot, and with a groan took hold of the bookshelf and pulled herself upright. When she turned, she was startled by an apparition gliding through the morning light of the library entrance. She clutched her book bag tight and swallowed.

  Librarian that she was, Olive possessed a deeply organized mind. She went systematically through the possibilities. Was it Death? Olive had always believed that Death, when he came for her, would enter through the front doors of Pratt Library. She touched a hand to her heart. Still beating. Not Death. Another possibility: raccoon? They were up in the joists, the little devils making themselves right at home. Or was it Oriana Jeffers?

  “Oriana? Is that you?”

  For the last heart-wrenching year, Oriana Jeffers had been Pratt Library’s most important patron. That’s what Olive should have said to Stu Giptner. “You keep the lights on in a library the same way you keep the lights on in the emergency room of a hospital. Why don’t you understand that, you parsimonious dimwit?”

  * * *

  Ordinarily, when the great oak doors groaned open and someone entered Pratt Library (Fred the postman usually, or somebody in quick need of the restroom) there would be a burst of sunlight, a bright harsh intrusion on the dim and quiet. But when Oriana Jeffers came through those doors, the light transmuted into moonbeams and star-shimmer, and all the books on the shelves fluttered awake. Oh joy, they whispered, a reader.

  Olive would grin and give Oriana a big wave. “Is that my favorite customer?” she called. “Is that Oriana Eagle-Dare FeatherTop Frog-a-lina Cinderella Athena Snow Queen Jeffers?”

  “You can just call me Oriana,” Oriana would answer, waving back. She adored Olive Perkins. Olive was all the best things: she was incredibly wrinkly and smelled like pipe tobacco and she had a sudden laugh that scared the spit out of you and she hated the computer, but she’d use it to search the ends of Susquehanna County for an interlibrary-loan copy of the book you wanted if Pratt Library didn’t have it on its shelves. Also, she used curse words.

  “Oh, may I call you Oriana? May I, just?” Olive would reply.

  Another thing Oriana liked about Olive was that she greeted you with a handshake like you were a grown-up, and she let you call her by her first name. “That’s what names are for,” Olive explained. “If you don’t use them, they wither and blow away on the western wind.” Which was yet another thing Oriana liked—Olive talked like a book. Wither and blow away on the western wind. Compared to Olive, other adults spoke in grunts.

  Olive would come forward and shake Oriana’s hand, peering past her to Amanda Jeffers out front in her blue pickup truck. Olive would wave, and Amanda would reciprocate with the smallest possible nod then drive off to do errands. Amanda was not a fan of Olive and her library.

  Olive’s and Oriana’s library ritual was always the same: greeting, handshake and then the echo. Olive knew that ceremony and routine were important to a child engulfed in moonbeams and possessed by grief. Oriana would cross the chipped brown linoleum floor—a travesty from a library makeover in the 1950s—to the circulation desk and slide the books she was carrying in her arms into the returns slot. The sound of the books hitting the metal cart echoed off the marble walls. Off that echo, Oriana would clap her hands to make the library echo again. In Olive’s library, Oriana was encouraged to do things like clap her hands loudly.

  “You’ve earned the privilege,” Olive told her back when Oriana started coming so frequently after Dean Jeffers’s death. “You are now, officially, a Voracious Reader, Second Class. I am a Voracious Reader First Class, which I earned by reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary, which has over 300,000 entries. But it took me eight years, child, so don’t be disheartened. As a VR-2, you have certain inalienable rights and privileges, foremost of which is, a VR-2 is allowed to clap her hands in this library whenever the hell the mood strikes her.”

  Olive then proceeded to lead Oriana around the floor of the library demonstrating the best places to get an echo. Since no one ever came in, there was no one to disturb. They clapped and they hooted.

  Olive called out to her, “I’d like to shoot off a pistol in here one day. That’d be an echo! I’d shoot the raccoons that live up in the attic.” She pointed to an ever-widening hole in the high ceiling above the nonfiction section. Oriana looked up and saw a pair of glittering eyes peering out from the dark.

  “Not a good idea,” Oriana said. “You don’t know who that raccoon might turn out to be.”

  Oriana knew all about Actaeon who’d been turned into a stag and Ulysses’s men transformed into
pigs by Circe, and The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast and The Enchanted Snake and The Golden Crab.

  “Yes, yes, metamorphosis. But I’m pretty certain,” Olive said, “that the raccoons running through my walls and ceilings have always been raccoons. Not every animal is an enchanted human, do you think, dear?”

  Oriana sucked on her lower lip and tugged at her ponytail. “I don’t know. But I think around here a higher amount of them than usual are enchanted. We have lots of forests, you know? And more stars at night. And we have mountains and valleys, though of course our mountains are more like big hills because we live in the Appalachian Basin.”

  Olive clucked her tongue. “You are a wondrously bright child.”

  Oriana smiled. “But it is special here, don’t you think, Olive, because of the mountains and stars? And it’s the Endless Mountains we live in. Endless means infinite. And infinite means anything could happen.”

  Olive felt the urge to pick up a magazine from the periodicals rack to fan away the heat of this child, but then she thought, Oriana is on a difficult journey, and as long as she has a book with her she will come to no harm. Olive wished Amanda Jeffers understood that. Well, perhaps she did, the act of continually allowing Oriana to come to this place was an acquiescence.

  One rarely knew what Amanda thought, but yes, Olive decided, Amanda’s actions spoke for her—she’d entrusted Oriana to Pratt Library. If only Amanda would come in to pick up a book, too, once in a while, it would help ease her own pain. Dean Jeffers dying so young, the abrupt end of life and love—Olive could not bear the thought of it.

  * * *

  A scrabbling erupted overhead, followed by an exchange of low yowls and hisses. Olive looked up. “Well, maybe those raccoons were human beings once, like you say. But ornery humans. In fact, I’m pretty certain one of them is Arnie Geisczler, who was before your time.” A piece of plaster fluttered down from the edge of the hole. “Those creatures. How can I run a library that has more wildlife than all outdoors?”

  Wait, who was she talking to? Oriana had not come into the library.

  Not good, not good, talking to yourself, Olive. Don’t do that, old girl.

  A rustling sound. Someone was definitely in here. A shadow moved through the stacks. “Grum? Is that you?” No, of course it wasn’t. Why would she even say that?

  Because grums were very much on her mind. It had been such an unsettling week. The Grum’s Ledger had arrived in her home mailbox last Monday. The return address on the big manila envelope was Shapiro & Pullman, Estate Law, Scranton, PA 18503. Olive had never received an envelope from a law firm before, and it frightened her. She thought at first that it was some kind of real estate maneuver by Stu Giptner, the sneaky lizard. But that didn’t really make sense. Composing herself with a cup of elderberry tea and a few puffs on her meerschaum pipe, she opened the envelope.

  Inside was a simple legal letter and an odd book, written by hand on the lined pages of an old accounting ledger. The author had a very unsteady hand, as if it had taken every ounce of his strength to render the tale. On page one there was a large drawing of the grum slumped atop a mountain of gold coins. What a wretched, despondent creature! The look on its face pierced your heart. The eyes filled with such regret, such longing, so unbearably sad.

  Olive read the book. It was only a few pages long, a simple story by an amateur author. Over the course of her life she had read a million stories better than this one, more clever, more poetic, more interesting. Yet after reading it Olive cried for two straight hours, smoked three bowls of tobacco and drank a shot of bright green crème de menthe with a spring water chaser to calm her shattered nerves. She stayed awake all night.

  What a tale! Charlotte’s Web, Of Mice and Men, Romeo and Juliet, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Yearling, The Lorax, The Fault in Our Stars, Tuck Everlasting, Atonement and Old Yeller—drop the lot of them into a literary centrifuge, distill out the pure essence of sorrow, and even that devastating extract would be nowhere near as sad as The Grum’s Ledger.

  The next morning, Olive took the book to the library and attempted to lose it on the shelves. You didn’t throw a book like that away, and you didn’t keep it, you didn’t know what to do, you just didn’t know.

  Oh dear, but what she did. Why? Well, it was a fairy tale and she had nothing on hand to give Oriana when the girl came through the doors on Tuesday. So impulsive of you, Olive—you shouldn’t have done it!

  Olive didn’t know whether she’d handed off the book to help the child or to get it out of her library and away, away.

  “Miss Perkins,” came a close-by voice from the YA stacks.

  Olive nearly jumped out of her skin. “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

  A thin man with stringy black hair and dressed in an ill-fitting green suit stepped anxiously before her, the sputtering fluorescent lighting casting his features in uneasy light and shadow.

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s just me, Ronnie Wilmarth, Miss Perkins.”

  Ronnie tugged at his tie. He wasn’t used to being so spruced up. He’d never worn a real tie before, or a suit. Susie Davis at the Goodwill store had helped him tie his tie and told him the suit looked fantastic on him. It smelled like mothballs. And his armpits smelled like Right Guard deodorant, his cheeks like Gillette Lemon-Lime shaving cream and his hair like he didn’t know what—he’d just grabbed a thing of shampoo off the shelf at CVS and tossed it into his cart with the rest of the stuff. He’d bought practically every type of human cleansing and purifying agent ever invented, and now here he was, washed, flossed, shaved and combed, standing in the middle of Pratt Public Library coming clean in the most important way of all.

  “Ronald Wilmarth,” said Olive. “Well.” He kept one hand behind his back, she noticed. He was hiding something.

  “Just plain Ronnie please, ma’am.”

  She cocked her head. “Not many Wilmarths left around here. Used to be hordes of them up in the hills.”

  Ronnie nodded. “Yep, Wilmarths have thinned out, pretty much. Died, moved down to Wilkes-Barre and Allentown and what all.” And some in prison, he didn’t add.

  “You Wilmarths weren’t big readers.”

  Ronnie closed his eyes a moment, trying to see a book in any of the cluttered houses and trailers of his aunts and uncles and cousins. Lots of dusty porcelain figurines and crocheted knickknacks on the shelves, no books. Except the Bible of course, though he couldn’t recall anyone actually cracking one open for a read.

  “Not big readers, no. So, about that. Here’s the thing, Miss Perkins...” He scrunched his face in anxious concentration.

  “Yes, dear?”

  Ronnie gulped and looked up at the ceiling, as if looking to the stars and beyond. “The thing is, last night I had another visitation from Dean Jeffers who—and everybody around here knows this—I killed because I was off eating a hamburger at Jim’s Diner when I should’ve been beside my buddy when he dropped dead in the middle of Brian Taylor’s field and turned into a snow angel.”

  Olive blinked. “Do you mind if I sit down, Ronnie? That’s a lot of plot in one sentence, dear.”

  Olive walked over to the circulation desk, removed her coat and sat. Ronnie followed and stood hunched on the other side of the desk. Still hiding whatever it was behind his back.

  He said, “See, it’s about the feathers. His feathers. Last year, after Dean died? Well, I got drunk, and I mean real drunk, and passed out in the snow. And when I opened my eyes next morning, right there beside my head was one of his wing feathers. And these feathers, see, it’s been a sort of regular thing, showing-up-in-strange-places-wise.”

  Holy cow, thought Olive. How had the death of Dean Jeffers come to play such a large part in her life? But she nodded encouragingly. “All right, dear. But there are a lot of birds in the Endless Mountains. Feathers abound.”

  “Yes, ma’a
m, there are natural, everyday feathers, but there are also, um...”

  “Magic feathers. Snow-angel feathers.”

  “That’s right! Magic feathers. It’s been going on for a year, his magic feathers all over the place. Feather on my windshield one time, another time one on my boot-scrape outside my front door and three weeks ago one sitting right there on the seat of my tractor...”

  Olive nodded, as if Ronnie was making sense. She felt like a priest hearing a convoluted confession. Except Wilmarths weren’t part of her flock—they weren’t readers. What was he doing here? In the Church of the Holy Library? But she leaned forward, always a sucker for a narrative.

  Ronnie said, “I can’t always figure out what a Dean feather means. I know he wants me to help Amanda and Oriana, but sometimes he has other requests. But the feather that came last night? I know exactly what it means. It’s about making amends for a crime I committed in the past.”

  “Oh my,” Olive said.

  “When I understand what he wants, it’s important I do it, Miss Perkins. If I can do for Dean, if I can be a better Ronnie, it’s a way of kinda bringing Dean back to life. I mean, I know I can’t bring him back, but maybe I can carry out his wishes and desires beyond the grave. If I do what he wants me to do—even if I don’t always understand the meaning—that way he’ll still be alive a little bit. Through me. Right?” His voice almost a whisper now. “Dean alive, you know what I’m sayin’...?”

  Perhaps it was the flicker of the fluorescent light, but the look in Ronnie’s eyes was the look of the grum in The Grum’s Ledger. The eyes drowning in the same sort of bewildered grief.

  “This time, Dean has sent me to you, Miss Perkins,” pleaded Ronnie. “To this place.”

  Olive craved a steadying puff on her meerschaum and a shot of crème de menthe. “All right, sweetheart. And he did this how, precisely?”