Panic and fear left as quickly as they had come, and what amazes me now is how much flows through the mind in such a short space of time. When I saw her eyes looking down on me, I remembered: the woman in red, my schoolmates, the people in town, the people in church, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, the kidnapping, drowning, prayers, the Virgin Mary, and my sisters, father, mother. I nearly had solved the riddle of my identity. Yet as quickly as it takes to say “Pardon me,” they vanished, and with them, my real story. It seemed as if the eyes of the statue flickered in the match light. I looked upon the enigmatic face of the Virgin Mary, idealized by an anonymous sculptor, the object of untold adoration, devotion, imagination, supplication. As I stuffed my pockets with candles, I felt a pang of guilt.
Behind me, the great wooden doors at the center entrance groaned open as a penitent or a priest entered. We zipped out through the side door and zigzagged among the gravestones. Despite the fact that bodies lay buried there, the cemetery was not half as frightening as the church. I paused at a gravestone, ran my fingers over the incised letters, and was tempted to light a match to read the name. The others leapt over the iron fence, so I scurried to catch up, chasing them across town, until we were all safely beneath the library. Every close call thrilled us, and we sat on our blankets giggling like children. We lit enough candles to make our sanctuary shine. Smaolach crawled off to a dark corner and curled up like a fox, his nose buried under a cloaking arm. Speck and I sought out the brightness, and with our latest books, we sat side by side, the scrape of turning pages marking time.
Ever since she had introduced me to this secret place, I loved going to the library. Initially, I went for the books first encountered in my childhood. Those old stories—Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Mother Goose, picture books like Mike Mulligan, Make Way for Ducklings, and Homer Price—promised another clue to my fading identity. Rather than help me recapture the past, the stories only alienated me further from it. By looking at the pictures and reading aloud the text, I had hoped to hear my mother’s voice again, but she was gone. After my first few visits to the library, I shelved such childish things and never again looked at them. Instead, I embarked upon a journey mapped by Speck, who chose, or helped me choose, stories to hold my adolescent interest: books like The Call of the Wild and White Fang, tales of adventure and derring-do. She helped me sound out words I could not decipher and explained characters, symbols, and plots that ran too wild or deep for my imagination. Her confidence, as she moved through the stacks and countless novels, inspired me to believe in my own ability to read and imagine. If not for her, I would be the same as Smaolach, filching comic books like Speed Carter or the Adventures of Mighty Mouse from the drugstore. Or worse, not reading at all.
Cozy in our den, she held on her lap a fat volume of Shakespeare, the type set in a minuscule font, and I was midway through The Last of the Mohicans. The flickering candlelight conspired with the silence, and we only interrupted each other’s reading to share a casual delight.
“Speck, listen to this: ‘These children of the woods stood together for several moments pointing at the crumbling edifice, and conversing in the unintelligible language of their tribe.’ ”
“Sounds like us. Who are these people?”
I held up the book to show her its cover, the title in gilt letters on a green cloth. We receded back into our stories, and an hour or so passed before she spoke again.
“Listen to this, Aniday. I’m reading Hamlet here and these two fellows come in. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet greets them: ‘Good lads, how do ye both?’ And Rosencrantz says, ‘As the indifferent children of the earth.’ And Guildenstern says, ‘Happy in that we are not over-happy. On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.’ ”
“Does he mean they were unlucky?”
She laughed. “Not that, not that. Don’t go chasing after a better fortune.”
I did not understand the half of what she said, but I laughed along with her, and then tried to find my place again with Hawkeye and Uncas. As morning threatened and we packed our things to go, I told her how much I had enjoyed what she had read to me about Fortune.
“Write it down, boy. If you come across a passage in your reading that you’d like to remember, write it down in your little book; then you can read it again, memorize it, and have it whenever you wish.”
I took out my pencil and a card from the stack I had filched from the card catalog. “What did they say?”
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: the indifferent children of the earth.”
“The last of the Mohicans.”
“That’s us.” She flashed her smile before going to the corner to wake our slumbering friend Smaolach.