Next Life Might Be Kinder (18 page)

Dr. Nissensen didn't seem to know where to go from here; I didn't know, either. We said nothing for ten or so minutes. A charitable way to view this: together we afforded him time to write in his notebook.

S
TARTING AT SEVEN
A.M.
, I spent the day, right up to dusk, at Vogler's Cove and almost succeeded in replacing thought with simply gazing at birds. It was as if my empty head became the cove, or vice versa, birds flying in and out, the wind, the sky. I tried hard not to think about things. It mostly worked.

Late morning, I sat at a picnic bench, looking at ducks through my binoculars. The hours drifted by. I walked the entire length of the cove. Sat in the café and had a lunch of fish soup and bread. Read the
Chronicle-Herald
(no articles about the movie). Then back out onto the beach, the wind bracing and the sun warm on the skin. As I was scanning the far shore, I saw Brian Moore walking by himself. He was dressed in khaki trousers, a dark green cotton shirt, a windbreaker, and brown hiking boots laced to the ankle. Brian Moore, my favorite living writer. I was tongue-tied even at that distance.

Despite Cynthia's saying, “Brian is very approachable—true, he doesn't suffer fools, but I'm sure he and his wife, Jean, would be interested in meeting you, Sam, not only because you're our friend, but because you're a published writer,” I did not approach him. Going by photographs I'd seen of her, Jean Moore, a good friend of Cynthia's, was a stunningly beautiful woman. Jean and Brian's house was on a somewhat isolated, wind-sculpted length of coast, no walking beach nearby. (I admit I'd gone out of my way to drive past the house a number of times.)

And now here he was, strolling down the beach, my favorite living writer.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,
The Feast of Lupercal,
The Luck of Ginger Coffey,
An Answer from Limbo,
The Emperor of Ice-Cream.
I had even sleuthed in the John W. Doull bookshop and found the “B-movie noirs, written to pay the bills” (as he once said in an interview):
Wreath for a Redhead,
The Executioners,
French for Murder
(written under the name Bernard Mara),
A Bullet for My Lady
(as Bernard Mara),
This Gun for Gloria
(as Bernard Mara),
Intent to Kill
(as Michael Bryan),
Murder in Majorca
(as Michael Bryan).

At about five o'clock, I went back to the café to get a coffee. I was in there about fifteen minutes when I looked up from the
Chronicle-Herald
and saw Brian Moore come in. He sat three tables over, as far as possible from my table, facing the window. Sarah was the waitress again. He ordered lemon tea and a scone.

I kept my head bowed to the newspaper, but I wasn't really reading. I was concentrating on not bothering Brian Moore. But ten minutes or so after his tea and scone were served, he looked over at me and said, “I recognize you from the photograph on your book. I was terribly sorry to learn of the death of your wife, Mr. Lattimore. Very rough, very rough. I can't imagine. Jean keeps me informed. I'm her husband, Brian.” He sipped his tea, just to warm up, it seemed, and decided to take the scone with him. He wrapped it in a paper napkin, stood, nodded goodbye, paid his bill, and left the café.

I was very excited to tell Elizabeth. She knew my feelings about Moore's novels. She had read only
I Am Mary Dunne,
which she admired. During our time in the Essex Hotel, I even stole—well, paraphrased—a few lines of his, from
French for Murder
and
This Gun for
Gloria,
for a
Mr. Keen
script.

Back in the cottage, I prepared a lamb chop, couscous (adding to it finely chopped, sautéed mushrooms), and asparagus for dinner. I moved the shortwave to the kitchen table and tried to catch channels from Europe, but the airwaves were all static and full of the high-pitched whistling sound that shortwaves make. I took a half-hour nap. At about nine-thirty, I threw on a sweater and went down to the shore. Philip and Cynthia were out; I recalled them saying they were having dinner with Brian and Jean Moore. I was ten or fifteen meters back from the beach when Elizabeth showed up, carrying the books, of course. She set them out on the sand.

“Elizabeth, I'm so happy to see you,” I said.

She walked a few steps toward me, stopped, and appeared to study my face for a moment. “You look so tired, Sam. You're not sleeping, are you?”

“In fact, I just now took a nap.”

“Then I can only imagine how you looked before the nap.”

“You'll never guess who I saw today over at Vogler's Cove. Brian Moore. I'm absolutely not kidding.”

“Did you faint on the beach, Sam? Did you need a fainting couch?”

“He stopped into the café there. He had lemon tea and a scone.”

“Did you talk?”

“He said something to me, just a few sentences. Me, nothing back.”

“Are you going to have those few sentences embroidered on a sampler and frame it and put it over your bed?”

“No, because I have the photo-booth photographs of us over my bed.”

Elizabeth looked out to the water: a few gulls, white flashes in the dark; a lot of stars; it was a very clear night. “Tomorrow night I intend to tell you what happened that day in the hotel. I think it's time, Samuel. I can't say all the reasons, but you'll just have to trust me. So I'll see you tomorrow night. Promise me.”

I felt a rush of anxiety and couldn't catch my breath. Still, I said, “I promise. Of course I promise. I'm here every night you are, without fail.”

“You forgot to tell me what birds you saw today. Did you bring your list with you?”

“Right here in my pocket.”

T
HE HOURS OF
the Port Medway Library were eleven
A.M.
to six
P.M.
Tuesday through Friday, eleven to eight on Saturday, and noon to five on Sunday. Sunday last, at around two
P.M.
, I drove over to look around. The library consists of three rooms: the main room, whose windows look out over the sea, a room for children's books, and the “reading room,” which contains three easy chairs, a sofa, and a long table with reading lamps.

It was overcast and dreary out. The moment I stepped inside the cobblestone building, I saw the librarian asleep at her desk, using her folded arms as a pillow. (I thought right away of Elizabeth's story of stealing a book in Wales; I now knew of two sleeping librarians, a continent apart.) Her dark brown hair was fanned out across—I looked—an open copy of
The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield.
There were no other patrons in the library. I toured the stacks in the main room and soon discovered, off in a corner, a section dedicated to natural history, especially that of Nova Scotia. In this section were field guides to birds, wildflowers, trees, fish, reptiles and amphibians, moths and butterflies. I also found a number of personal accounts, written by locals. One was called
When I Walk Out in the Morning: Notes on Birds and Bird-Watching
by Malcolm Drury. According to the back cover, Drury was born and raised near Vogler's Cove. In the author's photograph, an elderly Drury had a pair of field glasses hanging from his neck. After reading a few pages, I knew this was the book for me. The writing was direct and informative, with a pleasant style, not too many autobiographical distractions, and there were hand-drawn maps, a nice touch.

I tried to figure out the protocol for checking out books. Then I noticed a stack of three-by-five index cards on the desk. The librarian was lightly snoring. On the topmost card was the title of a book,
The Moon and Mrs. Miniver.
It all appeared quite efficient and perfectly well matched with the local feel of the library, which was built, according to the cornerstone, in 1902. So I took a new card from a stack on an adjacent table and wrote, “
When I Walk Out in the Morning,
borrowed by Sam Lattimore.” I had forgotten the date, so I didn't write that down, but I added my unlisted phone number. I wedged the card under the librarian's hand and left. Sitting in my truck, I opened the book at random to a section called “The Odd Sighting and Tidbits,” which included data from a scattered coterie of birdwatchers:

• Sept. 24—a dark-phase rough-legged hawk at Grand Pre
  
• Sept. 28—2 ospreys, 650 km offshore, at southern edge of the Grand Banks
  
• Oct. 4—a pied-billed grebe at Canning Aboiteau
  
• Oct. 6—a sandhill crane, east of Scotch village
  
• Oct. 9—a yellow-billed cuckoo in lower Canard Valley
  
• Oct. 10—two immature peregrine falcons, one yellow-billed cuckoo; on Brier Island, also a great horned owl hooting at night
  
• Oct. 11—a northern saw-whet owl tooting in the morning turned out to be Roger Foxall! (He did hear one on Brier Island)
  
• Oct.12—twenty-two American widgeons, thirty-seven greater yellowlegs in Canning
  
• Oct. 13—one stilt sandpiper, 400 green-winged teals at Sheffield Mills
  
• Oct. 18—a black-billed cuckoo east of Canning
  
• Oct. 21—a northern mockingbird in Canning; a Say's phoebe photographed on Brier Island
  
• Oct. 23—a bufflehead and many lesser scaup at Canard Poultry Pond
  
• Oct. 25—several fox sparrow seen in Truro
  
• Oct. 26—on Bon Portage Island, 5 Leach's storm petrels, 25 northern saw-whet owls, 1 boreal owl, 1 yellow-bellied sapsucker, 1 northern mockingbird, 1 red-eyed vireo, 1 northern oriole, a few water pipits on Bon Portage Island
  
• Oct. 30—125 buffleheads and a number of black-bellied plovers at Porter's Point
  
• Oct. 31—a dark-eyed junco singing in Wolfville
  

I read a few more pages and then drove home.

 

“Is this Mr. Lattimore?” the voice on the phone said when I picked up and said hello. “My name is Bethany Dawson. The card you thought was for borrowing a book was not. It was for inventory. You'll have to come in and start over, please.”

“I take it you're the sleeping librarian,” I said.

“Sounds like the title of a Perry Mason mystery, doesn't it? I deserve that, I suppose. I've had too many late nights—well, no matter. I confess I slept during library hours.”

“Well, I imagine there's no theft to worry about in the Port Medway Library. I'll drive right over and make amends.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lattimore. I understand you're a very private person, so leaving your phone number was appreciated. I'll file it away for safekeeping.”

“Be there in fifteen minutes.”

Bethany Dawson was about forty and mentioned almost right away that she'd been the Port Medway librarian for eight years. “People have asked my heritage—I mean, look at me, such a mongrel, eh? There's some Scottish and some Abenaki. In years long past such things happened, eh? That's how my grandmother put anything to do with ancestors, ‘in years long past.' With my grandmother you never knew if she meant a decade ago or in Bible times. And I've got traces of Dutch. All sorts of people got along well in my past, apparently. Ha-ha!” She had a nice laugh.

“Where were you born and raised?” I asked.

“Born in Anglo Tignish, Prince Edward Island. My mother and father were living there for a few years. But I grew up mostly in Kentville. Up through high school. Then off to study library science in Montreal. Then an early marriage. Then an early end to it. Ha-ha! Then assistant librarian in Bridgewater. Then fed up with Bridgewater. Then searched the job listings and up popped Port Medway. I live right next door to the library here.”

“The house painted robin's-egg blue. I've admired that house.”

“The exterior was painted by yours truly, so thank you.”

Bethany showed me the proper way to borrow a book. There was a brown, leather-bound ledger for that purpose. “The book by Mr. Drury hadn't been checked out in five years,” she said, “and it was last checked out by Mr. Drury himself. He said he'd given all his personal copies away. Are you interested in the local birds, Mr. Lattimore?”

“Sam, please. I'm hoping to stay in Port Medway a long time, and I'm trying to educate myself a little. I guess I like knowing the names of things.”

“I'm not admiring of people who keep life lists, so called. Reduces the variety in nature to arithmetic. Besides, as Emerson said in an essay, repetition of experience does not necessarily refine understanding. I agree with that.”

“I don't keep a list of birds. I'm just trying to tell one from another.”

“An owl from a heron,” Bethany said. “Not so difficult, really.”

“I mean one sandpiper from another sandpiper, one sparrow from another sparrow, one warbler from another warbler.”

“I had a seagull drop down my chimney last winter. I was sitting with a hot cocoa in my robe and pajamas and slippers a cozy morning, when all of a sudden in it fell and exploded out the cold ashes. But since I hadn't yet got to putting new logs on the grate, lucky seagull. Luckier yet, it didn't get stuck. Gulls are large birds. People don't always realize that. It took me nearly an hour to chase it out.”

“Well, Bethany, very nice to meet you. I'll do things correctly next time.”

“Any more questions? About the library, I mean.”

I hesitated, then said, “On the phone you mentioned my being a private person, but how did you come to that conclusion? We'd never met. I hadn't been in the library before today.”

“I regretted saying that the moment I said it. Naturally, us being on the telephone, I couldn't see your face, but I somehow knew what I'd said had put you off. Now that you ask, everybody in Port Medway talks about everybody else. Like they say, the mail route's a gossip route. Besides, we've got your first novel on our shelf, and when I heard you'd moved here, I read it, to familiarize, in case someone inquired. Also, we read the newspaper here in Port Medway, and your family tragedy, and the movie, has been . . .”