Rebinding

The gazetteer came back on a Tuesday, in the state gazetteers come back in when a reader has loved one too hard.

It was a Victorian volume, the county in its confident entirety, every hamlet and holding and half-forgotten lane set down in columns by men who had believed the world would hold still for them, and somebody had been living in it for a month, by the evidence, reading it in baths and on buses and propped against teapots, and the spine had gone at the joint and the front board hung by its cords like a door on one hinge.

Cal filled out the repair slip in her small exact hand, and carried it up to the workroom herself, which the slip did not require.

The workroom smelled the way it had always smelled, of glue and old paper and the dust of a hundred years of mending, and Margaret was at the repairs desk with the sewing frame threaded, working on an almanac whose stitching had given out, drawing the thread through, unhurried, at the pace of a woman who had worked there since before several governments and had never once been late for any of them.

Cal set the gazetteer down at the agreed end of the desk.

“Spine’s gone at the joint,” she said. “Front board’s loose. Returned Tuesday.”

Margaret put down the almanac. She took the gazetteer up and opened it, not at the beginning, in the middle, the way she opened everything, and turned it under the lamp, and ran one thumb down the broken joint with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman for whom damage held no surprises, only information.

“Loved,” said Margaret, as the finding.

She set it in the cradle and went back to the almanac, and that appeared to be the conclusion of the intake process.

Cal stayed.

She could have gone down. The desk wanted her, in the mild perpetual way the desk wanted everyone, and the slip was filed and the book was in better hands than any in the building, and there was no reason to stand in a workroom holding nothing while a woman with a needle went on with her work. She stood there anyway. The workroom was the quietest keeping-place in the building, quieter than the reading room, which kept a silence, because the workroom did not keep one, it simply had never seen the need, and the light came in low over the presses and the glue pots, and the thread went through and through, and nobody asked her anything at all.

She was aware, after a while, of being read.

It was not a look. Margaret did not look up. It was the way the needle went, and the way the silence sat, and the plain fact, known to everyone who had ever worked a floor with her, that Margaret took in the state of a person the way she took in the state of a spine, in passing, completely, and dealt exclusively in verdicts, and Cal stood in the low light being assessed by a woman who would never once mention it, and found, to her own mild surprise, that she did not mind.

She had said one word this month that mattered, and had no plans to add to it. The daylight world had not asked her to. The daylight world had gone on wanting its trolleys taken down and its slips filled in and its readers seen to, on schedule, in order, and there was a mercy in that which she had been taking, all week, in small unmarked doses, the way you take a medicine you have not admitted to needing.

Margaret finished her seam. She tied off, and trimmed the thread, and set the almanac aside, and took up the gazetteer, and began, without ceremony, to take it apart, which is the first thing mending is, and the thing nobody warns you about.

Cal watched the front board come away in her hands, clean, deliberate, the cords cut where they had half torn, the whole ruin made worse on purpose, made worse in exactly the ways it wanted to go, until it lay in its pieces on the desk in an order only Margaret could see. The old glue got scraped. The spine got cleaned back to the folds. It looked, for a quarter of an hour, like a thing beyond anyone.

Then the new cords went on. The needle came back. The thread went through and through, gathering the loose signatures one to the next, unhurried, at reading-room speed, which was slow everywhere and somehow always arrived first, and the shape of the book began to come back to it the way a sentence comes back to a man who has stopped in the middle of one.

Cal moved, at last, toward the door, because the desk’s mild wanting had ripened into something with a bell on it, and she was reaching for the handle when the verdict arrived, without slowing, delivered to the book.

“It’ll bind,” said Margaret.

Subject closed.

Cal went down the stairs with it. Somewhere between the workroom and the desk it filed itself, once under the gazetteer, where it belonged, and once somewhere else, in a drawer she did not open to check, and she answered the bell, and found the microfilm for a man researching his grandfather’s street, and took the trolley down, because the trolley wanted taking down, and the afternoon went on lending things out and taking them back, which was the whole of the trade.

In the workroom the press held the gazetteer, patiently, firmly, while the glue learned its work, and would hold it exactly as long as the mending took, and not a minute longer.