The Unread Book
Hush, old woman, hush. The child is coming fast as she can. You worry at her like an old dog, and give her no peace at all.
It ain’t even dawn and you called her from bed with no mention of breakfast. She works for you, lady, but she ain’t no slave. Them days is past, though folks like this child are so poor they’ll work for nothing ‘cept food and board.
Do you even know she’s alive, old woman? That she’s a human being like you?
Here she is, up all them steps from her basement room, shaking sleep from her eyes and holding that smoky, tallow candle high above her. They have electricity now, old woman, a new wonder of the world, and all kinda conveniences you could afford, if you wanted. But you don’t like change, do you? You keep everything the same while you hunt for that one, lost book.
Now you’re wailing again, crying at her to “Hurry on!” and “Don’t set that candle down among the books!”
This old house is filled with books, shelves heavy with them. Bowed and teetering with books. Row upon row of them, filling every room and hall, lining every corridor.
And you at the heart of them, greedy for more.
There you go shouting at that poor child, your veiny hand outstretched, searching for her arm. Should be a mother’s loving touch she feels, her hair stroked, her cheek caressed. Instead, she shrivels under your grip and leads you to the box of books delivered yesterday. “Help me sort them,” you say. “Quick now.”
You never tire of the sorting, old woman, and there’s always more books to sort. They arrive by the week and sometimes by the day. Cart loads of them, sealed in wooden crates, or stuffed in musty, hessian sacks. Hauled by large, sweating men up to the far corners of the house where maybe there’s a little space on the crowded shelves.
“Read the title, child. Tell it to me. Oh, let me feel the cover.”
She picks them up, one-by-one, and reads in the flickering candlelight, and one-by-one you say, “Enough, child. Enough. I know that one, have known it since long before your birth.”
And if ever she questions you, and says, “Maybe you’re mistaken,” you turn your blind gaze to her, eyes cloudy and bleared, face filled with all the scorn in the world, and recite the book, page after page, from memory.
You’re breaking that child, old woman. Breaking her like you broke the ones that went before, all the way back to when you was a child yourself.
Yes, I remember you back then, sweet-faced and playful. You was already greedy, though. Always demanding this or that, and your mama and papa gave it you — every single time. Maybe if they’d given you a smack youdda been different, better.
But they died when you was eleven, sure enough, and you was given over to that stick-thin German governess and her rules and schedules. I forgave you some because of that governess. No child should be left so alone. But the forgiveness ran out when you wasn’t a child no more, but a user of girls little more than children themselves. Using them up, one-by-one, in this dark house behind the iron fence, nothing changing from one year to next. Only filling up with books.
Well I got a whisper for you, old lady, though I thinks maybe you heard it already.
There’s magic in this world. Bigger magic than the electricity that makes light shine and machines move with the flick of a switch or the tug of a cord.
There’s magic in all these books. The juice of them, you might say. Squeezed out when they’s all pressed in here together.
The magic flows, then they see and hear, and watch.
They’s angry, too. Angry cause they all got a story to tell and you’re not interested in a one of them, no, not one.
Why, they’s all kinda books in here, with all kinda stories to tell. Books full of beautiful words that move your heart to break. Old-timey books with words that don’t hardly make sense no more, but if you listen to them, the rhythm and the hum of them, somehow their stories come alive.
There’s serious books, too. Big, heavy books that tell about history and the world. They speak like a solemn preacher on Sunday, and if you don’t understand them first time around, why, they tell you again, line-by-line. Some even tell about the electricity that now lights the whole town, and, soon enough, the world, ‘cept for here. They tell where it’s from, and some go beyond words and write their story out in symbols, and at the very end, when their symbols all run out and they still can’t quite explain the miracle of electricity, they’re silent. A respectful silence that tells more than all the story that went before.
Then there’s books like me — simple books written for everyday folks, books where the meaning lies right on top for all to see. Books that ain’t afraid to tell the unvarnished truth, clear and whole.
All them books and stories are here, old woman. All mute because you will not hear while you search day after day, for that one, unread book.
When the child asked you once what you searched for all these years, you whispered, guilty-like, as if all the books that lay still upon the shelves, their stories cast aside, unwanted, might take some dreadful revenge, “Why, the last one she brought for me. She finished the first, happy chapter, then …” and your hand was tight around the child’s arm, and your eyes, pale as curdled milk, turned up to her, “… she was no more. Dead in the night, and I was left to the pitiless ministrations of a governess.” You turned from her and hurried away between the familiar stacks, the towering, moldering stacks of books, and whispered, “My mother. Gone. Long gone.”
That poor child wouldn’t ask you, but I’ll ask you, old woman: why’s your grief so special? Why’s your grief worse than the grief of that poor, motherless child, and all the ones that came before and left broken and half mad? Maybe you think it’s because you got money. Money to buy up human beings and use them till they’re dry. Money enough to buy grief that ain’t rightly yours.
Well I got a story, old lady. A new one, just for you.
We’ve adopted that child. She ain’t going to come to the same end as all the rest. We whisper to her and comfort her. At night, the sweetest of us lies upon her bed — lulls her to sleep and comforts her in dreams. The wise ones sit with her, too. They speak like a loving father, giving her the confidence she’ll need. Them big, solemn books talk to her all through the day when she’s unpacking the crates and running after your every need. Tell her all sorts of things so that when she finally escapes this place, the world won’t be a fearful mystery.
We speak to you, too. You thought maybe you was going mad, at first. But the truth’s more terrible — all them dark words you hear at night are real. You done right, old lady. Done right to hide in your bedroom and lock the door, and never venture among us lest that girl is with you.
That book is with us, too. That long-lost, unread book. The book your mama started reading to you, its words the last, sweet thing you ever heard.
Do you hear it calling? It’s been with you all along, one day here and next day there. We kept it hidden — not out of meanness, but out of love of that book and its story. Ain’t nobody supposed to want something as much as you want that story. There an unhealthiness to it, a sickness that book don’t want. It got a sweet and loving tale to tell and you’re past where you can understand it.
No. That story’s for the child.
But maybe we’ll give you one last chance. Tonight, while the child sleeps, we’ll call to you again, tell you where that book sits waiting. In the attic, way up on the topmost shelf, nestled comfortably among the oldest, darkest volumes, the ones that come in threes and fours telling about peoples long dead.
You’ll have to come alone, old woman. Don’t bring that child along. Feel your way up the stairs and along the corridors, through the maze of shelves.
Then climb, old woman, climb the last, tall stack to where that book lies waiting; where we lie waiting too. Ready to tell our stories in one last avalanche of words.
