The Last Stop on My Book Route

How it started with Verla’s hip

In the fall of 2001, my mother-in-law, Verla Haskett, broke her hip stepping off the porch of the home place. At seventy-nine, she found out something worse than the hip. She found out she could not get to the library.

Verla had gone to the Ord library every other Saturday since 1948. She read the way other women her age ate, steadily and without comment. A mystery on Monday, a romance on Wednesday, and one of those thick family sagas with a map in the front for the weekend. Without books she got mean. I do not say that to be unkind. She told me so herself, from a hospital bed at Valley County Health, with her jaw set. “Verna, I will get mean without something to read.”

So on a Saturday I drove to town and walked into the library, a brick building with a bad radiator and a children’s corner with a rug shaped like a caterpillar. I carried out twelve books for a woman sitting in a recliner eight miles away. I carried them in a laundry basket.

The assistant librarian that year was a young woman named Golda Pfeifer, thirty-one years old, with a ponytail and a way of looking at you as though she were about to say yes before you had finished asking. She stamped the books to Verla’s card, and then she said, “Is there anybody else out your way who’d like some?”

I told her I couldn’t think of anybody.

I thought of Thelma Sevenker by the time I got to the stop sign. Thelma lived on the next section road, a widow of eighty-one, crippled up with arthritis. She used to sit beside me at circle meeting at church, and she had stopped coming the winter before. Nobody had noticed she was gone but me.

By Christmas I was driving to three houses. By the next spring Golda had started setting a stack aside for me without being asked, with sticky notes on the covers in her round handwriting. “For the man with the horses.” “She said nothing sad.” “Try this one on the lady with the peonies.”

The county had run a bookmobile once, a blue Chevrolet van with shelves bolted inside, until the budget put it up on blocks in 1996. Nobody had replaced it. There was no program, no grant, no volunteer shirt. The library did not pay my gas, and I never asked it to.

Orville farmed three hundred and twenty acres and measured everything in diesel. He did the arithmetic once at the kitchen table and put his pencil down.

“That’s about nine hundred dollars a year,” he said.

“About that.”

“Well,” he said. “Don’t tell the neighbors it’s cheap.”

That was how my husband said yes to things.

What I built out of what was in the house

Nothing in the route was bought. I had six milk crates from the dairy that closed in Arcadia, because books stand up in a milk crate and do not slide on a curve. I had a tin recipe box with a rooster on the lid, and in it a three-by-five card for every rider. I had a spiral notebook with a green cover from the Ben Franklin store, and I ruled four columns down the page with a yardstick. Date. Book. How it went. Received by.

The cards were the real thing. Anybody can hand a person a book. The cards were how I knew which one.

Thelma Sevenker, my first card says in blue ballpoint. Cozy mysteries, the kind with a cat in them. No dogs that die. Large print, her glasses are bad. Ask about the peonies.

Delmer Bonne. Westerns. The horse has to live.

I added to those cards for twenty-five years, in the margins, until some of them were more crowded than a church bulletin. What she laughed at. What she wouldn’t read again. The name of the grandson in the Navy.

I called them my riders, though I was the one driving.

The books got me in the door. What I carried in with them was the other half of the job. I stayed a half hour at every house, forty-five at some, and I drank whatever coffee I was handed, and I carried news from one kitchen to the next. Delmer says the fence is down on the Burwell road. Ruby Ann wants to know if you still have the same hound. Most of my riders had never met each other. They knew each other as names that I said. I suppose I was the road that ran between them.

Six houses, then, on a Thursday. Here they are, in the order I drove them.