Brooke ‘Bookeeper’'s Arc

Chapter 30 of 32

Brooke unlocked the library at dawn and found the tent already loud. A man's voice cut through the canvas walls. She crossed the lot fast, coffee still in her hand from the cart outside. Two of the new staff stood frozen by the shelf of magazines. The clerk's daughter held a chalkboard against her chest like a shield. A gray-bearded man in a worn green jacket stood over a younger man. He shook a battered diary in his fist, the cloth wrap loose, the red cord trailing. "That was my wife's," he said. "That was my daughter's after." The accused man sat on a bench with a pack at his feet, a canteen, a folded coat, a tin cup. He looked at the floor. A young woman in a yellow jacket stepped between them and put a hand on the bearded man's sleeve. The bearded man shook her off. Patrons had stopped reading. A woman with a coffee cup pulled her partner back toward the tent flap. Brooke set her cup on the plank floor. She asked the bearded man for the diary. He did not give it. She asked again and held out her hand. He passed it over like it burned him. She opened the cover. A name was written inside in faded pencil, and a date, and a child's drawing of a house. She turned to the accused man and asked him to say the name on the first page without looking. He could not. He said he had found the book in a crate by the road two towns back. He said he did not know whose it was. He said he had carried it three weeks because the cover felt soft. Brooke walked to the chalkboard wall and found his row. NAME. BOOK. STORY. She read his entry aloud. He had given the diary as his book on the night the hundred arrived. He had told a story about a crate by the road. The bearded man heard it and went quiet. Brooke closed the diary and held it out to the bearded man with both hands. To the accused man she said he could stay, but the book was not his to keep, and from now on every book brought into the tent would be logged against the chalkboard before anyone slept under the canvas. She told the clerk to draw a new column. PROOF. The bearded man took the diary and sat down on the bench beside the man who had carried it. He did not speak. The accused man wiped his face and nodded once. Brooke picked up her coffee. She walked the length of the tent and watched people open their books again. The line at the door began to move. The rule was new, and it would hold, and the hundred would stay in Rust with their stories on the wall.