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