B is for BELFRY
The bell in the church belfry
across the street chimed seven o’clock. Ethan hadn’t been aware that the
afternoon had been slipping by so quickly. At the last peal of seven, he stood
from the too-short reading chair he’d been sitting in for the last three hours,
engrossed in Edgar Wallace’s The Green
Archer. The molten sun of the
afternoon had burned out for the day, tempering the evening sky a cast iron
black, liberally salted with stars. There weren’t many visible from the
library’s top floor; not inside with all of the lights and reflections, but
he’d gaze at them in awe on his bike ride home.
And receive another stern lecture
about letting someone know where he was and how late he was going to be there,
no doubt. If anyone was at home to wonder, that is.
Ethan collected his books—Meet Mr. Mulliner by Wodehouse, The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher, the Wallace and
Melville’s Typee—and headed down to
the checkout station. As he left the library and swung one leg over the seat of
his bicycle, backpack cinched against his back for the ride home, he paused and
looked back at one of the few refuges he had in his hometown, away from the
bullies and condescending adults. One of the special places where adventures
and humor and wisdom waited for him in pages, on shelves, like fruit on waiting
limbs just ready for the picking. He was thankful for the two white stone lions
lying sphinx-like on either side of the front steps, guarding the building and
its magnificent domed glass roof and its glass second storey floors, where Dick
Tracy and Zorro and island gods and great mariners and Haggard’s Quartermain
and Maugham’s wry observations on the human condition and Chekov’s cynical
anecdotes and Verne’s sense of parlor-tale adventure all collided and lived
together in that proximity in peaceful cohabitation.
Great friends and great travels
that he could engage whenever he wanted, wherever he may wander.
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