Brooke ‘Bookeeper’'s Arc

Chapter 31 of 32

By late afternoon Brooke noticed the main building was already dim. The windows faced the wrong way for the setting sun, and the shelves near the back wall had gone gray by four. She watched a woman squint at a page, then close her book and tuck it under her arm. The woman walked out the door, past the tent, and toward the bar at the end of the road. Two men followed a few minutes later. Brooke counted six readers gone before the sky had even turned. She stood in the doorway and listened. From the bar she heard glasses and a radio. From the tent she heard nothing. She walked to the bar and looked through the open door. Half her afternoon patrons sat along the counter with their books closed beside their drinks. On the way back she stopped at a picnic table set in the dirt between the two buildings. Someone had dragged it there weeks ago. The metal top was scratched with tags in red and yellow paint. Three readers sat at it now, holding their books at an angle to catch the last bar light spilling from the door. One of them looked up at her. He said he would read in the tent if he could see the page. Brooke nodded and went back inside. She pulled the clerk and his daughter aside and told them what she wanted. They cleared the long table inside the canvas tent. Brooke walked to the bearded merchant's stall and traded two cookbooks for every candle he had. She came back with fourteen. She set them down the center of the table in tin cups and lids and a cut bottle. The clerk's daughter ran a wire from one tent pole to the other and hung four lanterns the survivors had carried in their packs. The young woman in the yellow jacket lit the wicks one by one. The canvas walls held the light and threw it soft across the shelves. Brooke walked to the picnic table and told the three readers the tent was open. She walked to the bar door and told the patrons inside the same. Eleven of them came back with her, books still under their arms. By full dark the tent was the brightest thing on the lot. Forty readers sat shoulder to shoulder along the benches and the floor. The candles burned down an inch an hour, and the clerk's daughter kept a basket of replacements under the table. Brooke stood at the flap and watched the line at the bar door thin. She told the clerk to add candles to the weekly trade list and to log every wick they burned. The light would cost her, and the wax would run out before winter, but the readers had come back, and the tent would stay open past dusk from now on.