Harry's Trees

by Jon Cohen

And Olive was feeling weak. Weak and overwhelmed. The return of The Grum’s Ledger had unsettled her. And, oh my, the state of Pratt Library. Ronnie, he was a good man, trying so hard. Fixing and patching as fast he was able. But it was a losing battle. He’d just tried to reinforce a beam above the bound periodicals, and a chunk of ceiling the size of a refrigerator had come down on him. He was shaking, he was so apologetic.

  “Miss Perkins, termites just made the wood too soft. I tried to slip in a ridge splint, but it didn’t hold.”

  They were standing there, staring up into the gaping hole, the dust of a hundred years swirling around them, when Stu Giptner walked in the front door with the county building inspector, Jerry Palco.

  Olive had always believed that Death, when he came for her, would enter through the front doors of Pratt Library. And now, here he was, Death in the guise of a wormy real estate agent puffed up with the authority of a town council president. But it was not her own death that was imminent (though she would’ve gladly switched places), but her beloved library’s.

  Stu and Jerry were wearing hard hats. Stu’s idea. Intimidating. Jerry had a pair of them in his trunk, since in his official capacity he checked a lot of buildings and new construction. Stu rolled his shoulders as he approached Olive and Ronnie.

  Jerry didn’t much like Stu, but he did like a deal. The deal was that Jerry lower the boom on Pratt Library, and for a minor kickback, Stu, as council president, steer the lot Jerry’s way. Jerry was telling Stu, yeah, definitely, a Dunkin’ Donuts, donuts being Stu’s weakness, but he was thinking, Qdoba, Mexican food being Jerry’s weakness. Jerry imagined free soft corn tacos for the rest of his life. And Jerry was visionary in a way Stu was not. America was changing, and it was about time the Endless Mountains region caught up. Donuts and chicken out, taco and tomatillo red-chile salsa in.

  Stu was almost giggling with pleasure as he surveyed the jagged hole in the ceiling. He wasn’t going to need to hire a demolition crew to knock this place down—Ronnie was doing it all by his lonesome. Stu eyed Olive, covered with so much dust she looked like she’d been dipped in flour.

  Flustered, Olive did her best imitation of her feisty self. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re thinking wrong, Stu Giptner. And your muscle here—” she shot Jerry Palco a withering look “—doesn’t scare me one iota.”

  “Not here to scare you, Olive,” Stu said. “We’re here to keep you safe.”

  “He’s got a point, Olive,” Jerry said. “I’m very concerned. Very, very concerned about the structural integrity here.”

  Olive went up on her toes. “Oh, such integrity. It’s just radiating off you scoundrels.”

  “That dust could have asbestos in it, Olive,” Stu said.

  Olive raised her dusty palm and blew it in Stu’s face.

  He leaped back from her. “Hey! Hey, no call for that.”

  “As if you haven’t sold a hundred places, brimming with asbestos, and God knows what all. You and your as-is properties.”

  He wished he had sold a hundred places. Olive gave him too much credit. Sure, he’d sold a few with asbestos. His biggest coup, though, two years ago, was selling to a pushy Canadian a place that was venting enough radon to fuel a nuclear power plant.

  “Jerry, ready to start your inspection?” Stu looked at Olive as he said this, meaning: You want to give in now, or you want to drag out the inevitable?

  Stu raised his clipboard. He’d play personal assistant, writing down the violations as Jerry did his walk-through.

  A sudden rumble in the flooring. Stu clutched Jerry’s arm. The bookshelves in nonfiction shuddered.

  Ronnie shuddered, too. Because he knew exactly what it was. Down in the basement—this morning he’d jammed a floor jack under a joist. Even fully extended, the jack didn’t quite reach, but instead of using a proper wood shim, Ronnie slid two books in to fill the gap. It was meant to be temporary, while he dealt with a leaky pipe next to the furnace.

  A bookshelf teetered.

  “Oh!” cried Olive, rushing forward. Ronnie held her back.

  The shelf tipped and fell. Slammed into the shelf across the aisle. Five shelves went down in a crash of metal and wood. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, the noise reverberating like cannon fire off the marble walls of the library. Books flying everywhere.

  Stu clasped his hands together in delight. “Dominoes!” He loved to topple dominoes. Actually, other kids’ dominoes. But this—books splattered and splayed on the linoleum like birds shot out of the sky, some of them still twitching and settling—was divinely thrilling.

  Olive almost fainted with despair. They sat her down in her chair behind the circulation desk. Stu patted her shoulder. She was too dazed to push his hand away.

  Ronnie took Jerry aside. “Don’t let him do this, Jerry. Two weeks is all I’m asking.”

  “What could you do in two weeks?”

  “I’ll get her up and running.”

  “Up and running? What you need to do, Ronnie, is run for your life. Really. This place is a hazard. Stu’s a jerk and an eager beaver, but he’s right on this one. It’s time to close the doors.”

  They left, Stu practically clicking his heels on the way out. Olive, who had been holding back, burst into tears. Ronnie enfolded her in his arms. She was tiny as a hummingbird. He could feel her heart thrumming against the thin bones of her chest. If it beat any faster, it would burst.

  “Don’t cry, Olive. We’ll get those bookshelves up in a jiffy. It’s just a sag in the floor.”

  She could not be consoled.

  Think, Ronnie, think, he commanded himself. You got to distract her before she has a heart attack. Should he take her home? What should he do?

  He looked around the library. Plaster and splintered wood everywhere, fallen bookshelves, holes in the ceiling. He wasn’t saving the place, he was wrecking it. He almost started to cry, too. Nothing he did ever came out right. He had failed Dean. Failed Olive. Failed Oriana. I don’t know what to do for anybody.

  Holding Olive, looking around at the dusty chaos of the library, Ronnie’s eyes fixed on a far corner, where a beam of light from a high leaded window shined down on an old overstuffed chair. The Reading Corner, where legions of enthralled children had once sat as Olive read stories to them. Ronnie had been one of those children. She had taken him to so many magical places.

  And then it dawned on him. There might be a way to distract her from her sorrow.

  “What are you doing?” Olive murmured vaguely from the depths of her misery.

  Ronnie scooped her up and carried her the length of the library, toward the long-unused Reading Corner, his work boots echoing on the hard linoleum. He put her in the chair, like a servant depositing the infirm queen upon her throne.

  Its effect was immediate, the power and the majesty of the throne strengthening the will. Olive roused and straightened. She looked around.

  Ronnie stood humbly before her. “Miss Perkins, please, ma’am, will you read me a story?”

  A brightness came into her eyes.

  She smoothed her hair, flexed her spine and shoulders, cleared her throat. As she had directed so many children over the decades, she now directed Ronnie. “Of course I will, sweetheart. Go fetch a book.”

  She sat erect on her throne. I will never abandon my post, she said to herself. This library will never close. Go get your book, Ronnie Wilmarth. Together, we will hold the fort. We are not the sole survivors. There are others like us. All those who once were children, scattered now in the hills of the Endless Mountains, they will hear my voice, and they will come to the rescue of Pratt Public Library.

  Kneeling in an aisle, Ronnie chose his book. It was one Ronnie had secretly read a dozen times, spellbound. That day he watched Miss Perkins hide it in the stacks—such a strange thing to do, and then, he decided, a very Miss Perkins sort of thing to do. A kind of game
to entice a reader. A special book, a treat for him to find. And what a book it was. The Grum’s Ledger. The grum, so sad. But then miraculously, the grum does the right thing and digs his lost love out from under all that gold.

  Ronnie stood before Olive, grinning ear to ear, holding the book behind his back. “It’s the saddest and happiest book I ever read, Miss Perkins,” Ronnie said, placing The Grum’s Ledger in her hands.

  Olive clutched the book to her heart. The color drained from her face, and her eyes rolled.

  For a horrified moment, Ronnie thought he’d killed her. And then her lips moved. She was whispering something. Ronnie leaned close.

  “Grum,” she whispered. “Grum, grum.”

  “Miss Perkins?”

  She opened her eyes. The look in them, infinitely sad. She opened The Grum’s Ledger. Stared at the grum. And the grum, atop his pile of gold, stared at Olive. The look in his eyes, infinitely sad. “I loved you,” she whispered to the grum. “With all my heart, I loved you.”

  Astonished, Ronnie dropped to his knees on the rug in front of Olive’s chair.

  She raised her eyes from the book and looked at Ronnie, and gave a great sigh. “I need to tell you a story, Ronnie. A real story. Will you please, please hear it? I need to tell someone the most important story of my life.” She reached out and touched his face. “It’s very short, and you already know how it ends.”

  “I don’t quite follow.” In fact, he didn’t follow at all.

  “It ends with a library crashing down around an old woman named Olive Perkins.”

  Oh my Lord. “No ma’am,” he said. “I won’t let that happen.”

  “Sweet Ronnie. You are strong and wonderful and kind. That’s the part you play in the story. My faithful knight and guardian.”

  Frankly, the look in her eyes, the dreamy sadness of her words—it was scaring the pants off Ronnie.

  Olive began her story. “Several weeks ago,” she said, “I received in the mail a large envelope. The Grum’s Ledger was inside, and a letter from a lawyer. And I quote: ‘As per the instructions of Alexander Grum, who died on January 4, 2017, in Fair Acres Assisted Living Facility, in Delphine, Colorado, enclosed please find The Grum’s Ledger.’”

  “The grum’s name is Alexander?” Ronnie said, utterly baffled.

  “No, dear. The grum was a real person. Alexander Grum. He was real. Just as I was once real. If our pasts are ever real.”

  Olive rose from the chair and led him by the hand to the bound periodicals, scattered now on the floor. She tapped one with her foot. “That one. Pick it up for me, dear. It’s heavy.” Ronnie picked it up. “The Olde Scrantonian,” Olive said. “A society journal, long defunct. Turn to Volume 38, April 1951, page 32.”

  Ronnie found the page. A group of photos from Scranton high society, in the flush years when coal and lumber money had made men rich. Grand houses, parties, boat rides on the Susquehanna, Christmas balls. Olive tapped a small photo on the lower left. A young man in a tuxedo, the caption under it, “Alexander Grum.”

  There he was. And there it was in writing: Grum, not grum. There was a sweetness in his face, but a vulnerability, a weakness in his eyes.

  “Look at the paper on that page,” Olive said. “Puckered and wrinkled. From my tears, sweetheart. It’s the only picture I had of him, and over the years, I looked at it often.”

  My tears, sweetheart. Ronnie thought: Alexander Grum, you made Miss Perkins cry. Ronnie bristled protectively.

  “Drop it back on the floor, Ronnie. He deserves to be dropped with a thud.” The bitterness in her voice, blending with a depthless melancholy.

  Now she led Ronnie to a small, oak-paneled alcove at the very back of the library. On the wall were fading photographs of library committee chairmen, book sales and, most importantly, five head librarians dating back to 1906. The last in the succession, dated 1959, was a pretty young woman wearing glasses.

  “That’s you,” said Ronnie. He peered intently at the young girl’s face. “The tortoiseshell glasses!” he gasped.

  In anticipation of his discovery, Olive had already opened The Grum’s Ledger to the last page. She read, “‘Casting away the last of the gold in great heaps and hurls, the grum uncovered another treasure, his first and truest, which he had lost long ago—a beautiful young woman with chestnut hair and tortoiseshell glasses.’”

  Olive smiled wistfully, patting her thin, gray hair. “I did have rather nice hair.”

  “Where are the glasses?” Ronnie said. Her current ones were nondescript wire-rims.

  “Broken and thrown away, long ago. The glasses, my youthful abundant hair, all of it the memory-dream of an old man dying in a nursing home. Alexander Grum was real. And he turned our story into a fairy tale. I recognize, even in these shaky letters—” she held the handwritten book out for Ronnie to see “—the same hand that composed secret love letters to me, long, long ago. The same hand that once placed a diamond ring on my finger.”

  “You were married, Miss Perkins?”

  “Jilted, Ronnie. Rings slide off as easily as they slide on.”

  “But The Grum’s Ledger is a love story.”

  “It’s a remorse story.” She softened. “But yes, there was love. We met by chance, in the dining car of a train, bound for Scranton. I was coming home after visiting an aunt in New York City. We talked. He charmed me. I flirted. Didn’t even know I knew how to flirt. We fell in love. He would come here, to New Milford, in his big car. We would meet secretly in the moonlit forest.”

  “Secretly,” Ronnie said.

  “The word is poisonous,” Olive said. “It sounds like a word whispered by a serpent. ‘We have to keep it a secret,’ Alexander would say. ‘Until we tell the world.’ By which he meant his parents’ world. The world of money. I had none. No secret there.”

  “But he loved you.” Ronnie saw it so clearly. Handsome Alexander and beautiful Olive in her tortoiseshell glasses, strolling hand in hand in the forest.

  “Not enough to overcome his fear,” Olive said. “He abandoned me for money and tradition. That’s the remorse of the grum.”

  “But The Grum’s Ledger ends happily,” Ronnie said.

  “An utter fairy tale. Alexander Grum died in a nursing home, alone and penniless. I Googled him. On that irritating but handy machine.” She pointed to the single library computer in the cubicle beside the circulation desk. “He’d moved west. Married. The family business collapsed in the 1980s—they’d gone from Pennsylvania coal to Colorado copper ore. To nothing. Lawsuits, children squabbling, divorce. A dreadful, selfish story of money, money, money.”

  Ronnie pointed to the illustration in The Grum’s Ledger. “There he is. On top of his gold.”

  She tilted her head back and shouted to the heavens. “And you regretted it, Alexander!” Her voice echoing off the walls. Regret, regret, regret.

  Her eyes brimmed, but her jaw was set. “But I found happiness, Ronnie. I did. I found a life that otherwise I might never have had. It was the 1950s. If I’d married him, I would never have had a career. I would never have had Pratt Public Library. The children and my books. The readers. They were my family.”

  “You did wonderful, Miss Perkins.”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. Her sigh was the sigh of a young girl. “But I would like to have been loved. Openly and proudly loved, and not abandoned in the forest.”

  Ronnie drew her close. “And that’s what he wanted, too. It’s in the fairy tale. He loved you all his life.”

  “But what’s gained, sweetheart, that he’s telling me this now? Sending me a fairy tale from beyond the grave? What good has come of The Grum’s Ledger?”

  Ronnie had no answer. All he could do was hold the old librarian close. And all she could do was hold a book to her heart.

  * * *

  When you’re on a roll, baby, you’re really on
a roll.

  I mean, Stu couldn’t believe it. When he went back to the office after his beautifully successful encounter with Olive—oh, she was going down, baby, and Pratt Library with her—his phone rang. His phone never rang. And Jesus, this guy sounded serious. He was looking to buy land abutting the forest. Something special. And he wanted to know how hot the market was. Have people been renting or buying in the area? Wanted to come in and discuss it.

  I mean, this guy sounded like a mover and a shaker. Stu had never heard such adrenaline in a voice. A real player. When Stu asked him his name he said, “Let’s just keep names out of this for the time being.”

  Stu practically fainted with that one. He loved it. Was this going to be a cash deal? What the hell was going on here? Like the guy was fronting for the Russian mob or something.

  I’m making deals left and right. I’m in the zone. Pratt Library, this big fish on the phone. A big fish who makes things happen. Well, so am I. I’m the guy who makes things happen, too. Because the property next to the forest I got for you, Mr. Mysterioso? How would you like a hand-hewn, deluxe log cabin estate?

  Moving and a-shaking. Rocking and a-rolling. Smirking and a-smiling. Stu picked up the phone and called Steve Jones over at Susquehanna Mortgage & Loan.

  “Stevie boy! Stu Giptner. I need you to do a little tappity-tap on your keyboard for me. It’s time to advance that little mutually beneficial matter we talked about.”

  Because, Amanda: when you take a swing at Supreme Realtor Stu Giptner, he takes a swing back. God, was Stu feeling all-powerful. He saw himself sitting on Amanda’s back deck, a few months from now, knocking back icy shots of vodka with his new Russian friends. And then afterward, tipsy, they’d all go down to the shiny new Dunkin’ Donuts sitting right in the middle of where Pratt Library used to be.

  29

  Midnight. Amanda, wired and distraught, sat at the computer in the alcove off the kitchen. Oriana was asleep upstairs in her bedroom. The house was whisper quiet. The only sound, or it felt like a sound, anyway, was the anxious throb of Amanda’s heartbeat. She was going through her finances because Stu Giptner had truly nailed it. She was out of money. Close to it, anyway. Savings account down to nine hundred dollars. And half of that was thanks to Harry and his tree house rent money.