An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [43]
“Yes. Except that Will preferred Francis over Walter, over all the boys, over his own daughter. No matter what Francis did, he did it better than anyone else. My father loved him. He left his entire collection to Francis, including the Crimson Hexagon.”
“That was generous of him.”
“Will suffered a lot in the years before he died. His diabetes was out of control. His mind and eyesight were failing. If it wasn’t for Francis and Walter, I don’t know what I would have done. Walter read to him. Francis worked on his collection, listing everything, annotating the items.”
I sit next to her on a piece of driftwood. “Why was your father collecting this material in the first place?”
“Because that’s what you do when you’re a collector. There’s an incredible excitement always pushing you to reach the boundary of the collection. Often it’s infinite or unattainable. That’s what makes it frustrating and compelling at the same time. It’s something to be passionate about.”
“Or obsessive.”
“It’s no different than someone who decides he’s going to scale a high mountain. He does that, then he sees a higher mountain and he puts all his energy into reaching the top of it. Then he sees another one and so on and so on. That was Will. It made for a difficult life. But that’s the price you pay when you’re really passionate about something And the collecting was only a small part of it. He had to organize, catalogue and transcribe most of it. The originals had to be preserved. If that wasn’t enough, then he had to write about it in his book, The Emerging Voice of Newfoundland. Another time, it was A History of Reading and Writing in Early Newfoundland. The title changed every week.”
“Were you collecting along with him?”
“Not while he was alive. Will, Walter and Francis had their no-girls-allowed club. Reminds me of the History Department. I don’t want to think about that. It’s too depressing. Come on!” She pulls me to my feet then drags me towards the waves.
“Stop. It’s too cold. We’ll get wet,” I tell her.
I reach my arms around her back and legs to try to lift her in the air. I lose my balance then stumble onto the rocks, laughing. She takes off her shoes and socks. I do the same. We roll up the legs of our trousers then wade in the water holding hands. It’s painfully cold. I jump back out and pull her with me.
“Come on,” she says. “You’ll get used to it.”
We walk from one end of the cove to the other in water up past our calves then past our knees. Later, before the daylight blue surrenders to black, we sit on a piece of board washed up on the beach in the yellow glow of the bonfire with the smell of seaweed on our hands and smoke on our clothes. Sparks shoot out. The heat is intense. The backs of the minke whales rise and fall not far from shore. The gulls dive then swoop up with fish tails hanging from their beaks. Behind us, way up on top of the cliff, her house watches over us. The fire crackles and pops. We stare into it with no more than a comfortable silence between us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
berry-picking lessons cont’d
NORAH MAKES A CONFIDENT BET that she can teach me to swim by the end of the summer. I’m confident she’ll lose her bet. “Swimming is natural: like making love,” she says.
I’ve had six weeks of lessons and I’ve swallowed as many litres of pond water. Even the dogs are laughing at me behind my back. I’d be better off in a swimming pool or in any water where there’s an actual bottom. I don’t care if it’s concrete, sandy or rocky. Anything but boggy. It would also help if Folio would go with the other dogs instead of swimming around me. Norah says Labrador retrievers make the best seeing-eye and water-rescue dogs. I wonder what that says about me.
She coaches me from the shore. “Hold your head above the water.”
I practice gripping the boulder with only one hand. “Are you talking to me or Folio?” My feet touch the bog – or is it something furry rotting at the bottom? A carcass of a moose floated to the surface in June. Norah said the people from Wildlife took it away. How do they know there