The Last Stop on My Book Route

The last stop

You always save the longest visit for the last stop. I did not plan it that way. It happened, the way a river finds its way to the low ground, because there was nowhere to be after Emil’s and so nobody to make me leave.

Emil is eighty-eight. He farmed a quarter section south of Elyria with his brother Frank until Frank died in 2004, and then he rented the ground to the neighbor boy on shares and stayed in the house. Bachelors out here have a way of going quiet when the last person they talk to dies. Emil went so quiet that by that Christmas, the pastor out his way told Golda, nobody had seen him in town since the funeral.

Golda sent me. I drove up a gravel lane, past a machine shed with its door hanging open, and knocked on a kitchen door that had not been knocked on, I suspect, in a good while.

He was a tall, stooped man with big hands, and he held the first book I gave him, a western, the way you would hold somebody else’s baby, with both arms and not a lot of confidence. His grandparents had come over from Bohemia. His kitchen had an oilcloth on the table with a pattern of cherries worn off in the middle, a lamp with a pull chain, and a clock on the wall that had stopped at twenty minutes past four. I never asked which day.

He told me he’d keep the book, but his eyes were bad. He said it quick, as soon as I handed it over.

I took that to mean what it said.

The next Thursday the book was on the table where I had left it, cover closed, the library bookmark exactly where I’d put it. I brought another. I filled out his library card for him at the oilcloth, and when I slid it across for his signature, he held up his right hand and showed me how it shook. “Won’t hold a pencil steady,” he said.

So I wrote his name myself. And in the notebook, in the column at the end of the line, where it said Received by, I wrote E.K. in my own handwriting every Thursday for twenty-two years.

It took me two years to understand. A man who says his eyes are bad, and whose hand shakes, and whose mail sits in a laundry basket under the window, some of it with the envelopes still shut after the stamp has gone out of date. A man who keeps a co-op calendar on the wall where the squares are filled in with numbers only. A 3 for the doctor. An 11 for the feed man. Never one word on it.

I stood in that kitchen one winter morning looking at that calendar, and it came to me all at once, the way a face comes up out of a pattern in the wallpaper. Emil Kusek could not read.

I did not say a thing. I put the coffee cup down.

I had been raised that a man is entitled to keep one thing. Orville kept his worry. My father kept a bottle in the barn. Emil kept this, and he had kept it for sixty-some years, from a school board and a wife and a brother and a church, and he had kept it, evidently, from me. It did not seem to me that a library book was worth taking it from him.

But I did not want to leave him with nothing to do with the books.

So that winter I said something I had not planned. I said, “Emil, I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me read out loud a little before I go. I’ve got nobody at home who’ll sit still for it. Orville falls asleep.”

That was nearly true. Orville did fall asleep.

Emil looked at the stove for a good while. Then he said, “All right.” And then he said something else, and this is the part I did not understand for twenty-two years.

He said, “Turn it around so’s I can follow along.”

I thought it was pride. I thought, he knows that I know, and he is asking me to pretend he is following the print so that neither of us will have to say it. So I turned the book on the oilcloth to face the two of us, and I put my right forefinger under the first line, and I slid it along under the words as I read, the way you do for a child on your lap. I did not say anything about it. I thought it was the gentlest lie I knew how to tell.