Chapter 55 The Last Chapter

They arranged the reading room for it without once discussing the arrangements, the way families set a table for a funeral meal. Lily moved the lamp from its stand to the long table so the light fell across one open place. Iris brought the chair — not the blue chair, which was for arriving and being caught, but the plain wooden one from the corner, the one that put you at eye level with your listeners. June took the end of the table with her notebook open and her pen capped, because tonight she wanted her hands free; she had learned in eleven days that some pages you receive before you write them. Margaret settled onto the bench by the shelves with her arms folded into her coat, an old woman making herself comfortable for whatever was coming, and Lily stood last of all at the foot of the stairs, facing outward, keeping the door of the room the way she kept everything: by standing where she could see both the people and the dark. Ezra stood at the table. He had washed his face in the little sink behind the stacks and it had helped less than he expected and more than he deserved, he said, and everyone understood what he meant. He held the book closed against his chest one last time — the way you hold, at a graveside or a nursery door, something you are about to set down forever — and then he opened it past page one hundred and forty, past the fold his father's finger had kept, past the ribbon-shaped crease his mother's ribbon had left in the paper all those years, to page one hundred and forty-one. The Leaving Season, chapter seventeen, the last chapter, unread by any Marsh since a welder named William died mid-sentence of a flaw he was born with. "Nobody stop me," Ezra said. "If I stop I won't start." And he read. The last chapter was short. It had been written, you could feel it under every line, by someone who knew exactly how much air she had left in the room and refused to waste a breath of it. It told of the boy on the point — the keeper's son, who had tended the winter light through the whole book while his father went down to the boats — grown now, tall now, walking out at dusk to light the lamp as always, though there had been no boat to bring his father home this year either, or last, or ever again. And on the gallery rail, tucked under the latch where no weather could take it, he found a page in his mother's hand. One page. She had never learned to say things straight out, that woman; the whole novel stood witness to that. But the page began: Since you were small you have asked me what happened at the end of stories, and I have always said, wait and see. So here is the end of mine, and I am sorry it is late. She wrote: Your father's boat went down with my heart aboard it, and I do not intend to spend your life teaching you to grieve the way I grieve, which is badly. So hear the ending instead. The ending is this. He read to you every night because his own father never once did, and he made a promise over your cradle that the chain would break at you or not at all, and it broke at him, and here is the thing I have walked the point all winter to understand: a promise does not die with the man who makes it. It only waits for the next pair of hands. You are the next pair of hands, my darling. Light the lamp. Read to somebody. Anybody. Read slowly, and aloud, if you can bear it, and let the story go on being true by going on. And below that, the last lines of the last page of the only book she ever wrote: The boy lit the lamp. And years later — this is the true part, the part they will tell you is sentimental, and they will be wrong — years later there was a child in that bed upstairs, and a book in those hands, and a voice in that room saying, what do you think he'll do now? And somewhere out on all that black water, if there is anywhere at all, a man with rope-scarred hands leaned against the rail of whatever comes after boats, and heard it, and was glad. So he read. That is the ending. He read, and read, and read. Ezra's voice held. There were places it thinned to almost nothing — the cradle line, the rail of whatever comes after boats — and June's pen was moving across her notebook now, fast, blind, taking down fragments she would find later she could not remember writing; and Margaret had taken off one glove without noticing; and Iris sat with Delia's finished poem open in her lap, not reading it, just touching the edge of the page where her own handwriting met her sister's; and up at the top of the stairs, through the door left open to the night, the golden light rose off the shelves like heat off summer stone and climbed — climbed the stairs, crossed the landing, poured itself thin and shining over the sill and out into the street, so that anyone passing the building that night would have seen, for one long minute, the whole doorway glowing like a kiln, like a hearth seen from a frozen field, like exactly what it was. He closed the book. The sound of it closing was very small and very complete, a sound like a period at the end of sixty years of sentence, and in the quiet after it, Ezra Marsh stood in a stranger's lamplight with his family's finished book in his hands and discovered that he felt — he searched for the word and refused the easy ones — unclenched. His father was not in the first hundred and forty pages. He had known this for eleven years and never once known it, and he knew it now: his father was in the reading of it. All four readings of it. In the bunks and fo'c'sles, in the teacher's flat, in the boy's bedroom with the television mutering jealousy downstairs. A book like this didn't hold a person the way a photograph holds a person, still and fixed and receding. It held them the way a sea holds rain: every time it was opened, the person was in the room again, doing the voices, asking what do you think he'll do now. "I have to give this away," he said suddenly. They looked at him. "That's how it works here — Iris told me, that night on the threshold, I've thought about nothing else since. A finished book isn't an ending; it's a handing on." He looked around at their faces, at the lamplight lying on the table like something spilled. "I don't know who yet. But there's a kid somewhere in this town whose father works nights, or whose mother's gone, or — someone with a fold in their life at page one hundred and forty. When I find them, I'll know. And until then — " he set the book down in the pool of lamplight, gently, spine toward the shelves like a returning traveler laying down luggage — "it stays here. Where books come home to." Far beneath them all, floors down at the desk in the deep place, the Writer's pen touched the second book — the new book, the one begun the night a girl named June had written her first word in the golden light — and for the first time since the library was young, the pen wrote upon it a sentence that was not a question. Upstairs, Lily felt it come up through the soles of her shoes like a struck bell, and lifted her head, and listened, and her face in the golden light was the face of a keeper hearing the tide turn.