Work Song - Ivan Doig [16]
I smoothed my mustache while I thought that over. I had to admit, presenting myself at a wake most every night made me feel uncomfortably like one of those mechanical statuettes of Death that clank out of a guildhall clock tower at the appointed hour and chase the merrymakers around the cupola. Grace had a point about the reasonableness of that as a lasting occupation. “Life as cryer does have its drawbacks,” I conceded to her. “A main one is that I wake up each morning feeling as if my brain were being pickled, gray cell by gray cell.”
She prompted: “And while you still have a few to spare?”
“Tomorrow,” I said with sudden decision, “I shall find the public library and consult Polk.”
Grace paused in her sudsy grapple with the meat platter, puzzled. “Poke who?”
“The Polk city directory.” I smiled. “The treasure map to where ledgers are kept.”
4
There is an old story that any Londoners with a madman in the family would drop him off at the library of the British Museum for the day. I was given a searching look as if I might be the Butte version when I presented myself at the desk of the public library that next morning and requested both the R. L. Polk & Co. City Directory and Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars in the original Latin.
The stout woman I took to be the head librarian—she had eyeglasses enchained around her neck commandingly enough for it—scrutinized me some moments more, then marched off into the maze of shelves while I found a seat at a broad oaken table. Everything was substantial, the brass-banistered stairway up to the mezzanine of books in tall rows, the green-shaded electrical lights hanging down from the high ceiling like watch fobs of the gods. I have always felt at home among books, so when the woman from the desk plopped my requested two in front of me, they seemed like old friends dropping by.
Aware that I should get down to business, I nonetheless drew the Gallic Wars to me first, unable to resist. I had ordered it up by habit, as a test. To me, a repository of books is not a library without that volume in the mother of languages, but merely a storehouse for worn copies of H. Rider Haggard’s jungle thrillers and the syrupy novels of Mrs. Mary V. Terhune. No, Caesar’s prose that reads like poetry—Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres—is essential in a collection of knowledge, a siren call from Roman words to ours. Handling the book fondly as I was, I became aware of its own touch: tanned leather, not the more common calfskin cover put on for show. I examined the binding: sewn rather than glued. On the pages, lovely to finger, the sentences practically rose from the paper in a strong clear Caslon typeface. What I was holding was an exceptionally fine copy, so much better than my own that had gone astray with my missing trunk that I momentarily found myself envious of the Butte Public Library.
Just then a drove of schoolchildren came pattering through, herded toward the downstairs by their shushing teacher, evidently to a story hour. Second-graders, I judged, that unhushable age when whispering is as natural as breathing. I felt a pang as the class passed through like a murmur in church. The distance of ten years evaporated, and I swear, for some moments I was back at the Marias Coulee one-room school, my stairstep eight grades there in front of me as intricate and intriguing as a daily circus. And after school, the mental workout of Latin lessons with the keenest pupil a teacher ever had, Paul Milliron. Sitting there, watching this motherly teacher shoo her boys and girls along as they descended the library stairs a whisper at a time, I envied her the job but knew it was too late in the school year for me to even think of such an application. Besides, my credentials were not exactly the standard ones.
Sighing, I patted Caesar and closed him away. Opening the city directory, I began to work my way through the idiom of Polk. There they were as ever, the abbreviated citizens found throughout America, brklyr, carp, messr, repr, et cetera. The skills