(continued) loggers—the logs identified, even graded, while still underwater, then recovered from the mud and murk by an improbable system of pulleys and booms; then once afloat, towed upstream to the great lumber exchanges of Pointe Coupee Parish, where one batch of logs was sold and trucked here to northern Louisiana to be sawed into the beams and floor joists of the old city high school.When the school was demolished in 1907, the bookstore owner’s great-grandfather purchased the beams and had them re-sawed into 2'' x 12'' planks as an investment strategy for an anticipated home-building surge which never occurred. The planks languished the next sixteen years in a family warehouse, more or less forgotten by the great-grandfather and then the grandfather—the wood stacked in a corner of a dusty warehouse and tended only by a solitary warehouse employee, who, with no instructions or authorization from anyone, re-stacked the entire pile of boards once a year, all ten thousand boardfeet, turning over each piece and cleaning out assorted dead mice and trash so that no warpage occurred, the planks still straight and true when the cabinetmaker appeared on the scene and the bookstore scheme was born. The current owner has inherited all this: the house, the bookcases, the old tales. At present he’s not sure which oppresses him more, the aging stock in his inventory, the usual Dickenses and Balzacs and Turgenevs, or the house and the bookcases themselves. All of which are acutely vulnerable to Louisiana’s rains, and thus every penny of the store’s profits has had to be spent on roof and gutter repairs and the thousand other necessities of a ramshackle house in a forgettable neighborhood in an unknown town in northern Louisiana, where the Goddamn rain is still pouring down, and there’s not a thing to do except pour another whiskey and look out the front driveway where no customers arrive.
Day five. A strange exhilaration spreads throughout the neighborhood with the news of last night’s altercation. Police cars, sirens: a young man, a young woman, the usual story. The bookstore’s owner’s daughter Claire has been spending the week at home during her Thanksgiving vacation. Last night she was visited by her boyfriend, Santiago, a town boy. Who is jealous of whom? we all ask. Santiago? Because Claire goes to college in New Orleans while he stays here? Or Claire? Because she is unsure of his fidelity while she is so far away? Whatever the case, Santiago was found bleeding, with a black eye and a broken nose on the front steps of the bookstore at midnight, while a contrite Claire tended to his face, freely admitting her guilt to one and all—to her father, her mother, to the police who drove her to the . . . << Return to TSAR Volume 7, Number 2 |
