Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [17]
I worked every day from morning till evening, and then at night I sneaked my way into the fields. With a book spread before me I struggled with those marks that covered the pages until early in the morning when my family started to rise. I lay back in the field, the corn swaying all around me, above my head, and the moon shining through and lighting up the pages. The more I studied those pages, the more different everything seemed: the cornhusks pulled back to reveal rows of shiny jewel-like kernels, and the moon marked out the shapes of the corn and the stalks, spooky and wonderful against the sky.
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