“Just want to help, little buddy.” Gilly flashed her crooked-politician smile.
“I’m all right,” the boy said in a small strangled voice. He slid his chair a couple of inches toward Trotter’s end of the table, so that he was no longer directly across from Gilly.
“Say, W.E.”—Gilly flashed her teeth at him—“how about you and me doing a little red-hot reading after supper? You know, squeeze the old orange reader?”
W.E. shook his head, his eyes pleading with Trotter to save him.
“My, oh, my, Mrs. Trotter. I can tell how old I am when I can’t even understand the language of the young people about me,” said Mr. Randolph.
Trotter was looking first at W.E. and then at Gilly. “Don’t you fret yourself, Mr. Randolph.” She leaned across the corner of the table and patted William Ernest gently, keeping her eyes on Gilly. “Don’t you fret, now. Some times these kids’ll tease the buttons off a teddy bear. Ain’t nothing to do with age.”
“Hell, I was just trying to help the kid,” muttered Gilly.
“He don’t always know that,” Trotter said, but her eyes were saying “like heck you were.” “I got a real good idea,” she went on. “They tell me, Gilly, that you are some kind of a great reader yourself. I know Mr. Randolph would like to hear you read something.”
The little wrinkled face brightened. “My, my! Would you do that, Miss Gilly? It would be such a pleasure to me.”
Trotter, you rat. “I don’t have anything to read,” Gilly said.
“OK, that ain’t a problem. Mr. Randolph’s got enough books to start a public library, haven’t you, Mr. Randolph?”
“Well, I do have a few,” he chuckled. “Course you’ve got the Good Book right here.”
“What good book?” demanded Gilly, interested in spite of herself. She did like a good book.
“I believe Mr. Randolph is referring to the Holy Bible.”
“The Bible?” Gilly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She had a vision of herself trapped forever in the dusty brown parlor reading the Bible to Trotter and Mr. Randolph. She would read on and on forever, while the two of them nodded piously at each other. She jumped up from her chair. “I’ll get a book,” she said. “I’ll run over to Mr. Randolph’s and choose something.”
She was afraid they would try to stop her, force her to read the Bible, but they both seemed pleased and let her go.
Mr. Randolph’s front door was unlocked. The house was pitch-black and mustier than Trotter’s. Quickly, Gilly pushed a light switch. Nothing happened. Of course. Why should Mr. Randolph care if a bulb burned out? She stumbled from the hall to where she thought the living room should be, fumbling along the wall with her fingers until she found another switch. To her relief this one worked—only 40 watts worth, maybe—but still there was light.
Leaning against two walls of the crowded little room were huge antique bookcases that reached the ceiling. And stacked or lying upside down, even put in backward, were books—hundreds of them. They looked old and thick with dust. It was hard to think of funny little Mr. Randolph actually reading them. She wondered how long he had been blind. She wished she could push her mind past those blank white eyes into whatever of Mr. Randolph all these books must represent.
She went toward the larger shelf to the right of the door, but she felt strangely shy about actually touching the books. It was almost as though she were meddling in another person’s brain. Wait. Maybe they were all for show. Maybe Mr. Randolph collected books, trying to act like some big-shot genius, even though he himself couldn’t read a word. No one would ever catch on. They’d think he didn’t read because he couldn’t see. That was it, of course. She felt better. Now she was free to look at the books themselves.
Without thinking, she began to straighten out the shelves as she read the titles. She saw several volumes of an encyclopedia set: “Antarctica to Balfe,” then “Jerez to Liberty.” She looked around for other volumes. It bothered her to have everything in a muddle. High on the top shelf was “Sar saparilla to Sorcery.” She dragged a heavy stuffed chair backward to the shelf and climbed up on the very top of its back. On tiptoe, leaning against the rickety lower shelves to keep from toppling, she could barely reach the book. She pulled at it with the tip of her fingers, catching it as it fell. Something fluttered to the floor as she did so.
Money. She half fell, half jumped off the chair, and snatched it up. Two five-dollar bills had fallen out from behind “Sarsaparilla to Sorcery.” She put the encyclopedia down and studied the old, wrinkled bills. Just when she was needing money so badly. Here they’d come floating down. Like magic. Ten dollars wouldn’t get her very far, but there might be more where these came from. She climbed up again, stretching almost to the point of falling, but it was no good. Although she could just about reach the top shelf with her fingertips, she was very unsteady, and the lower shelves were much too wobbly to risk climbing.
Heavy footsteps thudded across the front porch. The front door opened. “You all right, Gilly, honey?”
Gilly nearly tripped over herself, leaping down and grabbing up “Sarsaparilla to Sorcery” from the chair seat, stretching her guts out to tip the book into its place on the shelf. And just in time. She got down on the chair seat, as Trotter appeared at the door.
“You was taking so long,” she said. “Then Mr. Randolph remembered that maybe the bulbs was all burned out. He tends to forget since they really don’t help him much.”
“There’s a light here,” Gilly snapped. “If there hadn’t been, I’d have come back. I’m not retarded.”
“I believe you mentioned that before,” said Trotter dryly. “Well, you find anything you wanted to read to Mr. Randolph?”
“It’s a bunch of junk.”
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Trotter said in a maddeningly calm voice, wandering over to a lower shelf as she did so. She pulled out a squat leather-bound volume and blew the dust off the top. “He’s got a yen for poetry, Mr. Randolph does.” She handed the book up to Gilly, who was still perched on the chair. “This is one I used to try to read to him last year, but”—her voice sounded almost shy—“I ain’t too hot a reader myself, as you can probably guess.”
Gilly stepped down. She was still angry with Trotter for bursting in on her, but she was curious to know just what sort of poetry old man Randolph fancied. The Oxford Book of English Verse. She flipped it open, but it was too dark to see the words properly.
“Ready to come along?”