“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 quiver,
little breezes dusk and shiver,
thro’ the wave that runs for ever,
by the island in the river,
flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
overlook a space of flowers,
and the silent isle imbowers,
the Lady of Shalott.”
The words ran through my veins, seeped into me and made images appear all around me. I could have reached out and touched the willows and aspens, as light and soft as silk. I didn’t even know what the words meant, all of them, but I could see them, see the woman trapped in the island by the river, the garden outside. Suddenly I felt heartbroken.
The poem went on, and I watched the boats skimming down the river, the people walking by, the woman in the tower weaving and singing, cursed if she looks down at Camelot.
“Why can’t she look?” I asked suddenly, angrily, turning to Mary.
She looked up and shrugged. “She’ll be cursed,” she said. “Curses are funny things.”
I held my breath and listened. Don’t look, I thought. Don’t look. When Lancelot entered with his broad, clear brow and helmet, I held my breath.
“She left the web, she left the loom,
she made three paces thro’ the room,
she saw the water-lily bloom,
she saw the helmet and the plume,
she look’d down to Camelot.”
“No!” I called out, as, in the poem, the web flew out and mirror cracked. I covered my eyes.
The next thing I knew, Mary was closing the book and kneeling beside me. I peeked out and saw her shaking her head, marveling at me. “It’s not real,” she whispered. “It’s just a poem.”
I put down my hands, flushing with embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Don’t be.” And then she smiled down at me. The world went back to normal.
I breathed out in relief. “I hate Lancelot,” I said.
“Me too,” she said, laughing. “Now how about some tea?”
I remember those days like hot baths after days spent in the snow. Sometimes we’d just sit cross-legged on the floor, a picnic lunch spread around us, as she told me about the strawberry farmer and his mistress from town, or the boy who was engaged to two girls at once, or the post office station manager’s wife who was pregnant with a dairy farmer’s child. Mary knew every strange, clandestine thing that happened in Oakley. Not too much happened in Oakley outside these sordid affairs of the heart, though: no crimes of passion or big, earth-shattering events. The town was too small to attract the traveling shows that dotted the Midwest through the summers, and you’d have to travel all the way to Kansas City for anything worth seeing. Once, some boys in town got in trouble for defacing the scarecrows that rose out of the cornfields, and that caused more of a ruckus than anything else had in months.
Sometimes we were silent for hours at a time. I would read while Mary just sat there quietly, rolling her cigarettes or trying to organize the papers Mercy Library received each day, the copies of wedding licenses or birth certificates that we’d haul to the vast file cabinets downstairs.
“Why do we bother with this?” I asked once. “What does it matter?”
Mary ran her hands along the cabinets, until she found the right one. She slid it open and began leafing through scattered papers and folders. “Here,” she said finally, pulling out a few thick sheets of paper as if she were a magician. “Some librarian before me filed this right after you were born,” she said. “Look. Tessa Riley, born to Lucas and Roberta Riley of Riley Farm.”
I stared down at the sheet of paper, the harsh, typed words. She flipped through the papers, showing me all of them.
“There are files for Matthew, Connor, and Geraldine, too, and Lucas and Roberta. Your whole family, right?”
I nodded. It was so strange to see our names laid out like that, as if our lives had enough precision to them that someone could type out the details like that—but there they were, their names next to mine.
“You never talk about them,” she said. “Why don’t you ask your sister and brothers to visit one day?”
I looked up at her, startled. “Oh, no,” I said. “No. Please don’t do that.” The idea of Geraldine or Matthew or Connor in Mercy Library seemed all wrong. I pictured them storming through the aisles, books crashing to the floor as they clomped past. I imagined the looks on their faces when they saw me drinking tea with herbs floating at the top.
Mary slipped the papers back in their folders and shut the drawer. “It was just an idea,” she said, flicking her finger against my arm. “So, no more Rileys here if we can help it. I’ll put a big sign in front that says they’re not allowed.”
I smiled, relieved, but sadder, much sadder than I had been before I’d seen my name in black type. Later, without Mary knowing, I went back and back to those papers, which almost tore in my shaking hands. I looked at the names of my parents and felt the most profound sense of longing and loss, though I barely recognized then that that was what it was: loss of the most heart-wrenching kind, despite the books raging with life around me, despite Mary and her kindness, her beautiful words and stories.
By and large, it was the men in Oakley who had begun reading books—bringing candles into their rooms late at night to read the Canterbury Tales, perusing Montaigne while sitting in tractors or on bales of hay. They loved coming into the library and showing Mary how they’d read the selections she’d made for them, telling her about their favorite parts and lines.
Women sought Mary out more shamefully, in whispers and with scarves pulled over their heads. Beatrice and Mrs. Adams were only two out of what must have been five hundred women who came to see Mary when I was there. In my first year of working at Mercy Library, I heard women confess to hating their children; to loving women instead of men; to cheating on husbands with all variety of other men, from farmhands to cousins to the traveling salesmen who sometimes appeared at our doors with cases full of perfume or makeup; to hating their lives, our town, and the fields that kept all of us wrapped around their fingers; and to desiring any number of things so strongly that they could barely eat or sleep or get through the house- or farmwork they saw pile in front of them each day.
Several months into my new working life, I was sitting on a small rocking chair near the table, struggling through a book called Sister Carrie that Mary had picked out for me, while Mary sat behind the desk with a deck of cards spread out in front of her. She played absentmindedly with her cigarette as I spat out each word, fitting my lips and mouth around them. The cards snapped as Mary shuffled them between each game. The day had been particularly grueling: we had talked to a woman having an affair with a boy half her age, despite her husband’s legendary temper. Mary seemed especially quiet, melancholy.
“Love, that’s all anyone asks about,” she said, sighing. ?
??It’s pathetic.” We finished closing the library together, then walked out into the balmy spring night, down to the river that ran a mile or so behind the library. We stretched on the grass by the river.
She turned to me. “Have you had any boyfriends yet, Tessa?”
“Me?” I looked at her, truly astonished.
“Of course,” she said, winking.
I didn’t know what to say. “Have you ever been in love?” I asked, finally.
“Oh,” she said, a smile forming. “Yes. Not for a long time, a very long time, but yes.”
“What is it like? Who was he? Is he the man from the post office?”
But she hardly heard my questions. Her eyes closed; the sweat glistened on her brown face. The warmth of her skin seemed to radiate all around me. I crept up close to her and put my face next to hers.
She said finally, “No, his name was William. From Rain Village. His body was perfect, like a sculpture you’d see in a museum, and he was just made like that. He would walk around naked, very casually, as if it were the most natural thing and his body were above such things as shame or modesty. Like a child’s white hair. As if he didn’t even know it.”
She seemed far away from me then, and to be talking to herself as much as to me. I squinted up, following her gaze. I felt that if I concentrated hard enough, I too would see him—naked, walking like a cat.
“He was pale, almost completely white. He was only a boy, you know. His hair was like the palest blond dipped in the ashes of a forest fire and his eyes were dark like wet river rocks. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep, and then he’d stalk around and curse the rain and the dark, and me. I would huddle in the blankets and block out every single thing but the warm imprint of his body, the faint smell of eucalyptus still in the bed.”
She stopped, and the night was quiet. All we could hear was the light lapping of the river, the slight wind stirring the grass and weeping willows and oak.
“His voice,” she whispered, “was soft and clipped, as if he’d been born in some other country. But he hadn’t been. Sometimes he could sit for hours and never say a word. He would carve designs into wood. If I moved or sighed, he noticed; he was always watching me, like I was made of glass.”
Her voice was so low I had to lean forward.
“He died. He drowned in the river. I remember how white and cold he was in the water, the leaves sticking to his skin. It’s why I left. Why I left Rain Village the way my older sister had before me. I left my mother, father, sister, and everything I’d known. William died in the river, and the leaves were like leeches on his skin.”
The night seemed to have darkened. Mary looked at the sky. I shivered, and she turned to me, reached up and touched my hair.
“You will fall in love, too. You won’t be unlucky like me.” She pulled herself up and sat cross-legged, facing me. “I left home. I just left, left my family and the rain and the river. And I went all over, and then I came here. Sometimes that is the best we can do in life: seek out new families and homes when the old ones have failed us.”
“Is that when you joined the circus?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. She tilted her chin to the sky, her hair sticking every which way. She reached out her hand and slipped it into mine. Her long fingers dwarfed mine, and my pale skin seemed to glow next to hers.
“Do you miss Rain Village?”
She nodded, bending her head to her chest. “We lived in a stone house,” she said a moment later, smiling slightly, “in the middle of a forest. A forest as big as the sky. The river where they found William ran almost straight through the forest, about a ten-minute walk from our house. It was a river unlike any you’ve ever seen, Tessa.”
“I’ve only seen one,” I said. “This one right here.”
“You haven’t ever traveled out of here?”
“My father would never let us. He says the world outside of Oakley is filled with evils.”
She smiled. “I don’t think Oakley is immune to that, no matter what your father says. And why blame the world when it’s right here?” She tapped her chest.
“I think he has evil in him,” I whispered. “He makes all of us cry, sometimes. Is that evil?”
She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “I think it is.”
“I want to travel,” I said. “I want to see Rain Village, and the circus.” I tried to call forth a picture in my mind. “What was the river like?”
“Oh,” she said, closing her eyes but holding my hand tight, “it was filled with salmon and other pink fish. The fishermen used to set their lines and let themselves drift along the water. They’d fall asleep like that, sprawled out on the fishing boats, the rain plinking down on their bodies.”
“That sounds terrible,” I said. “All that rain.”
“It was weird,” she said. “No one there complained about the rain, the dampness. There it was just normal. When I left, I baked myself in the sun, and I’ve been brown ever since. Before, in Rain Village, I was as pale as a ghost. I didn’t even know how curly my hair was until I left home and saw it dry for the first time.”
“That’s not true!”
“Oh, it is,” she said. “There, my face was covered in freckles, from the rain. When I left my skin turned completely clear. See?”
I leaned in and stared at her face, her brown, smooth skin. I gasped. “It’s true!” I said.
“Unless I’m lying, of course.” She laughed, and I was relieved, seeing her happy. “Everyone there was a storyteller, you know. At night the fishermen docked their boats and everyone gathered to tell stories. The water would have turned black by then, and if it weren’t too cloudy all the stars would be out, like they are now, like salt sprinkled over ink. Everyone who looked normal and friendly in the daylight turned spooky at night, with the flickering light and the black water behind them.”
“What stories did they tell?” I asked, not even noticing Mary’s spice scent anymore, the scent of rain was so forceful in my nostrils.
“Oh, all kinds,” she said. “Gossip and legends, kids’ stories, stories about our past.”
“Tell me one!” I begged, pressing my hands together.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “You really want to hear one?”
“Yes!”
“Well,” she said, “one of my favorites was a story about a prince and a peasant girl. My mother used to tell it when I was a kid.”
“What was it?”
“Okay,” she said, lowering her voice as if she were sharing a great secret. She leaned back on the grass and I lay next to her. Her hair spread out in corkscrews that tumbled down over my shoulder. I picked up strands of her hair and wrapped the curls around my fingers, and we lay there side by side.
“There was once a beautiful peasant girl,” she began, “who wore dresses that came up to her chin and ended past her toes. The girl lived in a tiny cottage with her husband, who was a good strong man who worked the fields.”
I laughed, imagining him in the fields in Oakley, the ones I ran past every day. I could see it.
“One day a prince rode into town on a gleaming black horse. He was so rich that every time he opened his purse men and women gasped as if he held the moon in there. But those women didn’t have a chance. When the prince saw the peasant girl, he fell instantly in love and was determined to marry her. He didn’t care whether or not the girl loved him back, and didn’t let the fact that she already had a husband deter him one bit. The peasant girl was not interested in the prince at all, and when he began hunting her down in the fields, she was sure that the devil himself had found her. ‘Help!’ she cried, and ran like a ribbon through the crops, so fast the prince thought she’d disappeared. But this only made him more determined; he bought the most luxurious home in town and moved into it that day.”
I closed my eyes, picturing it, imagining a red ribbon streaming through the cornfields, whooshing out into the road.
“Soon enormous crates began arriving, one by one, filled with all the
prince’s earthly belongings. He settled in and began trying to lure the girl in every earthly way—hosting lavish parties, sending jewels to her house, writing her poetry-filled letters—but he did not understand the strength of the girl’s love for her husband, or her religious fervor. Finally the prince realized that to possess this girl he’d have to find a way to bind her to him forever, so he sold off every single possession he had ever owned: every last jewel in his gigantic jewel vault, every richly brocaded shirt, every solid-gold candlestick and fork, every exotic bird in his private atrium. When the last item had been sold and he wore nothing but a simple peasant’s shirt and overalls, the prince sold his soul to the devil. He took the sum of his earthly life and brought it to a famous jeweler, who spent a month in his laboratory, mixing it all up in a great iron vat until, finally, he produced one perfect, sparkling opal ring, a ring more valuable than any ring made before or since.”
Mary sat up and pressed her hands into the grass. I thought of every beautiful thing I’d ever seen, reduced down to one stone. My mind wrapped around that image and held it close.
“The next time the prince saw the beautiful peasant girl, he approached her without a fear in his heart. Not even God could save the peasant girl from the fate that had been given her, the strength of that ring and the devil were so strong. Her heart split into pieces, the girl walked into her husband’s barn and came out on her favorite horse. Then she stopped, and the prince leapt upon it, and neither of them was ever heard from again. Until the day he died, the poor, abandoned husband prayed for the soul of his lost wife, who had disappeared into the world and, by all accounts, lived unhappily ever after.