37 MENDING
He crashed into bed the moment he got
home and did not wake again until noon. As soon as he did, Christian dashed
about the Book House, showering, dressing, wolfing down a breakfast much larger
than the tea and muffin he usually had. Then he scrabbled in the kitchen
drawers to look for a notepad and a pen. A list, he had to make a list. What
did he need?
Food, of course, but what else? He ran a
hand through his hair, mussing it up in a way that made him look like a
scarecrow, but he didn’t notice. What had he thought of last night? Oh, yes.
Pillows and a quilt so Minerva would be more comfortable, although it occurred
to him that in the daytime she would be a marble statue lying on pillows and
covered in a blanket. Oh, well. No one was going to see her anyway, and maybe
(if she could feel things when in statue form) she would be more comfortable.
He worked for half an hour on his list
of provisions, and when he was done this is what it said:
Nonperishable
food items
Gauze
bandages and scissors
Pillows
and blankets
Matches
Rope
Washrag
Rose
bushes and topsoil
Tent
Cutlery
and cookware
Tea
kettle and bags
Change
of clothes
Pocket
handkerchief
Books
Any other person might have looked at
this list and crossed off several unnecessary items, but Christian spent
several extra minutes mulling it over and wondering if he should add more. He
had never been camping before; he thought it was a good list.
Books, a tea kettle, bedding, scissors,
and cooking utensils he had, but he had never needed rope for anything and, try
as he might, he could not find the matches he thought he had. He took a bus
into London to buy the supplies he lacked. By late afternoon, with the help of
a man and his daughter who had seen Christian falling off the bus with his load,
the topsoil, rose bushes, tent, paper bags full of groceries and gauze, tea
kettle, change of clothes, and books were all loaded into the wagon from his
shed. He packed pillows and the extra quilt from his front closet around
everything. The rope hung on a hook beside the front door; the matches were in
Christian’s trouser pocket and the pocket handkerchief in his shirt.
He sent off a message to the head of the
accounting department to say an emergency had come up and he would be out of
work for a week or two. He felt guilty about it, but after all (he told himself
sternly), it was an emergency and he
really would be out of work for a while. Then he went to the reading-room and
attempted to fill the strange cavity in his chest with the words in his books.
But though he tried six different
novels, he found himself unable to concentrate on any of them. He set them
aside and instead moved about the house, feeling restless, straightening and
tidying endlessly to kill time until sunset.
He went to his bedroom for the clothes
he’d worn the night before but paused at the sight of the garden gnome on his
bedside table. It had been there since his second night in the park, when it
had presumably climbed into his pocket as he sat with Minerva. He should bring
it back. The park was not safe, but surely the garden gnome would at least
appreciate being brought back to life.
Christian took the garden gnome out to
the wagon and then returned to his bedroom. His clothes from last night lay on
the floor, crusty with sweat and covered in dirt and blood. He had stripped out
of them and thrown them aside before his shower. Now he picked them up to put
them in the wash, but not before feeling the pockets for leftover items. From
the front right pocket he pulled out his copy of The Hobbit, now more battered than ever. It looked worse than he
had realized last night. The edges of the pages were burnt. The cover had
disintegrated, as had the first several pages (a long and boring forward he
felt he could live without) and the last (Bilbo’s return to Bag End, which he
wished had survived). It needed binding or it would fall apart completely.
He dug about
in his closet for the book-binding materials he had acquired over the years:
binder’s board and glue, Bristol board, a craft knife, cloth, a bone folder,
decorative paper and waste paper, a weight, a straight edge, and thread. He had
not had occasion to use them in many years, as he hadn’t needed to scrounge in
scrap-heaps for books since he was a teenager, but he had brought them with him
whenever he’d moved, packing them into closets just in case.
He sat at the
kitchen table with the book and carefully cut away the remainder of its spine
so he could make a new one. This was, he thought as he traced a new spine onto
the Bristol board, the most delicate book-binding he’d ever needed to do. None
of the books he’d found in people’s rubbish bins as a child had been in such
poor condition, their pages curling at the edges and almost dry enough to
crumble to dust in his hands. Those books had always been in decent shape.
Perhaps their covers suffered from water damage or their spines had peeled
away, but the pages were always whole, always legible.
Christian
traced a front and back cover on the binder’s board and cut them out with the
craft knife. The familiarity and steady quietude of the work calmed him. Books
would never change, no matter what freakish things happened in the world. And
yet—He spared a glance out the window behind him as he glued the new spine and
covers to the cloth. The world did not look like any freakish thing had
happened. The neighbor he could see from his kitchen was nosing about in her
shed for the lawn mower, now that the day had cooled. A robin hopped about in
the grass. And somewhere across the street, Minerva lay on her pedestal with a
missing arm.
The roar of
the lawn mower cut through the evening air. The smell of exhaust drifted
through the window. Christian wrinkled his nose and bent over his book.
He was so
absorbed in his work that he did not notice when his neighbor finished mowing
her lawn and went inside for the night. When he finally looked out the window
again, he saw with some surprise the sky was dark.
Christian
closed the book, slipped waste paper between the covers to keep the glue from
leaking onto the pages, and placed the whole thing between weighted boards to
set. Then he hesitated. He was supposed to let the book set for at least a day;
otherwise air bubbles would form and it would not dry properly. But he needed
to leave, and he wanted to bring it with him.
He carried the whole contraption out to
the wagon. Then he went back inside, grabbed the rope from its hook, locked the
front door, and pulled the wagon across the street.
I am not leaving till this story is over!
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