"The world grows dark. Mr Yeats's blood-tide is at the flood. It rises. It rises."
He looks down at nil but graying earth, and Lisey is suddenly terrified that he's seeing it, the thing with the endless patchy piebald side, that he is going to go off, perhaps even come to the break she knows he is afraid of (in truth she's as afraid of it as he is). Before her heart can do more than begin to speed up, he raises his head, grins like a kid at a county fair, and shoots the handle of the spade through his fist to the halfway point. It's a showy poolshark move, and the folks at the front of the crowd go oooh. But Scott's not done. Holding the spade out before him, he rotates the handle nimbly between his fingers, accelerating it into an unlikely spin. It's as dazzling as a batontwirler's manoeuvre - because of the silver scoop swinging in the sun - and sweetly unexpected. She's been married to him since 1979 and had no idea he had such a sublimely cool move in his repertoire. (How many years does it take, she will wonder two nights later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?) The silver bowl of the rapidly swinging spade sends a Wake up! Wake up! sunflash across the heat-dazed, sweatsticky surface of the crowd. Lisey's husband is suddenly Scott the Pitchman, and she has never been so relieved to see that totally untrustworthy honey, I'm hip huckster's grin on his face. He has bummed them out; now he will try to sell them a throatful of dubious get-well medicine, the stuff with which he hopes to send them home. And she thinks they will buy, hot August afternoon or not. When he's like this, Scott could sell Frigidaires to Inuits, as the saying is . . . and God bless the language pool where we all go down to drink, as Scott himself would no doubt add (and has).
"But if every book is a little light in that darkness - and so I believe, so I must believe, corny or not, for I write the damned things, don't I? - then every library is a grand old ever-burning bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves every day and night. Fahrenheit four-fifty-one ain't in it. Try Fahrenheit four thousand, folks, because we're not talking kitchen ovens here, we're talking big old blast-furnaces of the brain, red-hot smelters of the intellect. We celebrate the laying of such a grand fire this afternoon, and I'm honoured to be a part of it. Here is where we spit in the eye of forgetfulness and kick ignorance in his wrinkled old cojones. Hey photographer!"
Stefan Queensland snaps to, smiling.
Scott, also smiling, says: "Get one of this. The top brass may not want to use it, but you'll like it in your portfolio, I'll bet."
Scott holds the ornamental tool out as if he intends to twirl it again. The crowd gives a hopeful little gasp, but this time he's only teasing. He slides his left hand down to the spade's collar, digs in, and drives the spade-blade deep, dousing its hot glitter in earth. He tosses its load of dirt aside and cries: "I declare the Shipman Library construction site OPEN FOR BUSINESS!"
The applause that greets this makes the previous bursts sound like the sort of polite patter you might hear at a prepschool tennis match. Lisey doesn't know if young Mr Queensland caught the ceremonial first scoop, but when Scott pumps the silly little silver spade at the sky like an Olympic hero, Queensland documents that one for sure, laughing behind his camera as he snaps it. Scott holds the pose for a moment (Lisey happens to glance at Dashmiel and catches that gentleman in the act of rolling his eyes at Mr Eddington - Toneh). Then he lowers the spade to port arms and holds it that way, grinning. Sweat has popped on his cheeks and forehead in fine beads. The applause begins to taper off. The crowd thinks he's done. Lisey thinks he's only hit second gear.
When he knows they can hear him again, Scott digs in for an encore scoop. "This one's for Wild Bill Yeats!" he calls. "The bull-goose loony! And this one's for Poe, also known as Baltimore Eddie! This one's for Alfie Bester, and if you haven't read him, you ought to be ashamed!" He's sounding out of breath, and Lisey is starting to feel a bit alarmed. It's so hot. She's trying to remember what he had for lunch - was it something heavy or light?