Renee

Parish

Chapter 8: Renee

The Vidalia Community Library occupies the ground floor of the old cotton exchange building on Carter Street, a two-story brick structure built in 1911 when cotton was the parish's currency and the exchange was the place where the currency was counted. The building's upper floor is empty now, has been empty for decades, the windows boarded, the ceiling above Renee's head stained with the water that enters through the roof that the parish council has not repaired because the parish council has not repaired many things, the list of unrepaired things being longer than the list of repaired things, the ratio being the arithmetic of a parish whose tax base is thin and whose needs are thick and whose decisions about what to repair and what to leave are the decisions of a body that must choose between the road and the roof, the bridge and the building, the essential and the merely important, and the library is merely important, which means the library is Renee's to maintain, Renee's to defend, Renee's to keep open against the annual threat of closure that arrives with each budget cycle the way the river arrives with each spring, rising, pressing, testing the levee of Renee's will.

She has been the librarian for twenty-eight years. She was not trained as a librarian. She has no degree in library science. She has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, earned in 1994, two years before she married Clem, the degree being the credential that qualified her for nothing and for everything, the nothing being the job market's assessment of an English degree and the everything being the preparation for a life of reading and organizing and caring for the objects that contain language, the books being the objects and the language being the thing the objects contain and the containing being the library's function, which is to hold the language in a place where anyone can access it, and the anyone is the parish, and the parish accesses it in the ways the parish accesses everything, unevenly, sporadically, with the particular gratitude of people who know that the thing being offered is not guaranteed and that the not-guaranteed is the reason the gratitude is real.

Renee opens the library at 9 AM. She drives from the house on Carter Street — the library is six blocks from the house, a distance she could walk but does not because she carries boxes, always boxes, the boxes of donated books and the boxes of supplies and the boxes of materials for the children's programs she runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the boxes being the logistics of a one-person library, the library having no staff besides Renee, no assistant, no volunteer coordinator, no page to shelve the returns, only Renee, who is the librarian and the staff and the janitor and the program director and the grant writer and the public face and the private engine of an institution that the parish needs in the way that the parish needs the levee, which is to say: essentially, though the need is not acknowledged in the budget, the budget acknowledging only the things that bleed or flood or burn, the emergencies, the library not being an emergency but being the thing that prevents emergencies, the prevention being invisible and therefore unfunded.

The library holds approximately 8,000 volumes. Renee knows the number because she conducted an inventory last summer, counting every book on every shelf in the three rooms that constitute the library — the main room, the children's room, and the room she calls the office, which is a closet with a desk and a computer and the files that document twenty-eight years of operation, the files being the library's memory, the way Earl's blue notebook is the ranch's memory, the written record of what was done and when and why.

The collection is not curated in the way that a city library's collection is curated, with selection committees and review journals and the professional apparatus of collection development. The collection is what has been given. The collection is the accumulation of twenty-eight years of donations — the boxes that appear on the library's doorstep, left by people who are moving or downsizing or whose parents have died and whose parents' books must go somewhere, and the somewhere is the library, and the library takes them, takes them all, because Renee's policy is to take everything and sort later, the taking being the relationship, the act of acceptance that binds the donor to the library and the library to the parish, the acceptance saying: We will hold what you give us, we will make a place for it, the making of the place being the library's essential act.

The shelves are wooden, built by Clem fifteen years ago, on a Saturday, with lumber from the hardware store in Natchez and the tools from his workshop and the help of Renee, who held the boards while he screwed them together, the holding being the collaboration, the husband and wife building the thing that would hold the books that would hold the language that would hold the parish's attention for fifteen minutes or an hour or an afternoon, the holding going deeper with each layer, the shelves holding the books holding the words holding the reader holding the silence that is the library's gift, the silence that is not empty but full, full of the attention of people reading, the attention being the thing that the silence contains.

The morning. Renee unlocks the door. She turns on the lights — fluorescent, humming, the hum being the library's ambient sound the way the refrigerated unit's hum is the truck's ambient sound, each space having its keynote, its base frequency, the frequency against which everything else is heard. She turns on the computer at the front desk. She checks the book drop — the metal box beside the front door, the box that holds the returns that people drop off after hours, the dropping-off being the trust, the patrons trusting that the book will be found and checked in and re-shelved and available for the next person who needs it, the trust being the library's foundation, the mutual trust between the institution and the people it serves.

Three books in the drop. Renee checks them in. She places them on the cart for re-shelving. She will shelve them later, during the quiet time between the morning's patrons and the afternoon's patrons, the quiet time being the time when Renee does the invisible work, the cataloging and the shelving and the mending and the ordering and the grant-writing that keeps the library functioning, the functioning being the thing that the patrons see, the lights on and the door open and the books on the shelves, and the patrons do not see the work that produces the functioning, the work that happens in the quiet time, the work that Renee does alone because alone is how the work gets done in a one-person library in a parish that cannot afford a second person.

The first patron arrives at 9:15. Ernest Guidry, seventy-eight, retired pipefitter, widowed, who comes to the library every weekday morning to read the Natchez Democrat, the newspaper that the library receives because Renee negotiated a free subscription in exchange for displaying the newspaper's advertising inserts, the negotiation being one of the hundred small deals that Renee has made to keep the library supplied with the things that libraries need, the newspapers and the magazines and the printer paper and the ink cartridges and the cleaning supplies and the light bulbs, the supplies being the infrastructure that the budget does not fully cover and that Renee supplements with negotiation and donation and the occasional purchase from her own money, the own-money being the subsidy that every underfunded public institution receives from the person who runs it, the person's salary being the visible payment and the person's out-of-pocket being the invisible payment, and the invisible payment is the one that keeps the thing alive.

Ernest sits in the chair by the window. He opens the newspaper. He reads. He reads slowly, carefully, the way a man reads who has all day and who uses the reading to fill the day, the day that would otherwise be empty, the emptiness being the condition of retirement in a parish where retirement is not a vacation but a diminishment, the reduction of a man from the person-who-works to the person-who-does-not-work, and the not-working is the loss, and the reading is the compensation, the newspaper being the connection to the world that the retirement severed, the world still happening, still producing events, still generating the news that Ernest reads every morning in the chair by the window in the library that Renee keeps open so that Ernest has a place to sit and read and be a person in the world.

Renee knows Ernest. She knows his reading habits. She knows he starts with the obituaries — the obituaries being the section that the elderly read first, the section that is the daily accounting of the generation's diminishment, the names of the dead being the names of the people Ernest knew, the people he worked with and drank with and went to church with, the names appearing in the newspaper the way stars appear in the sky, one by one, the constellation of the known thinning, the thinning being the fact of age, the fact that Ernest reads every morning in the chair by the window.

She knows Ernest's wife died four years ago. She knows his children are in Texas. She knows he eats lunch at the senior center on Tuesdays and Thursdays and eats alone the other days. She knows these things the way Clem knows the things the parish tells him — through proximity, through the daily contact that produces intimacy, the intimacy that is not chosen but accrued, the accumulation of small observations over years of seeing the same person in the same chair reading the same newspaper, the seeing being the knowing, the knowing being the care.

The morning continues. Other patrons arrive. Mrs. Thibodaux — not Marie-Claire but her mother, Genevieve, who comes on Mondays to return the romance novels she reads at a rate of three per week, the romance novels being the genre that the library has the most of, the donations skewing toward romance because the parish's donors skew toward women of a certain age who have read and re-read and are now releasing their collections, and the releasing produces the surplus, and the surplus means that Renee has an entire wall of romance novels, alphabetized by author, the wall being the most-used section of the library, the most-used being the measure of the parish's reading taste, which is: stories about love, about the pursuit and the finding and the keeping, the keeping being the thing, the way the keeping is always the thing.

Two children come in after school lets out at 3:15. Renee knows them both, though they are not siblings, not related, just two children whose afternoons converge at the library. The boy is Marcus, nine, who walks from the elementary school, four blocks, because his mother works at the Piggly Wiggly until 5. The girl is Lily, seven, Marie-Claire Thibodaux's daughter, who walks the same route because Marie-Claire's shift at the dollar store ends at 4:30 and the library fills the hour between. The library is the after-school care, the unpaid, unofficial, unacknowledged after-school care that the library provides because Renee is here and the children are here and the being-here-together is the care, and the care is the library's function, the function that is not in the mission statement but that is the mission, the actual mission, which is: provide a safe, warm, lit place where the parish's people can be, and the being is the service.

Marcus reads graphic novels. Renee has built a graphic novel section from donations and from the small budget line that the parish allocates for new acquisitions, the budget line being $400 per year, which is enough for approximately fifteen books at library discount pricing, and Renee spends a portion of the $400 on graphic novels because Marcus reads graphic novels and because Marcus is the reason the $400 matters, because the $400 is not an abstraction, the $400 is Marcus sitting at the table in the children's room reading Dog Man and laughing, the laughing being the sound that justifies the library's existence more than any mission statement or budget justification or grant application, the laughing of a child in a library being the purest argument for the library's continuation.

Lily reads chapter books. She is the child who carries the library card in her pocket. Renee gave her the card three months ago, filled out the application with Lily's name in Renee's handwriting because Lily's handwriting is still forming, still becoming, the letters large and uneven and full of the effort of a seven-year-old learning to make marks that mean things, and Renee wrote the name on the application and typed it into the computer and printed the card and gave it to Lily and Lily held it in both hands and looked at it the way a person looks at a thing that has been given to them that they did not know they could have, and the not-knowing-they-could-have is the poverty, the particular poverty of a child who does not know that books are free at the library because no one has told her, and the telling is Renee's job, and the job is the library, and the library is the telling.

Lily is Marie-Claire's daughter. Renee knows this, knows the whole web. Renee knows most of the connections in the parish, the webs of family and friendship and enmity and history that link the people to each other and to the place, the connections being the parish's infrastructure, more important than the roads, the human infrastructure that holds the place together the way the levee holds the land together, and Renee's knowledge of the connections is the librarian's knowledge, different from Clem's knowledge, because Renee's knowledge comes from the front desk and the children's room and the book recommendations and the conversations that happen when a person returns a book and says: I liked that one, do you have something else like it? And the something-else-like-it is the conversation, and the conversation is the connection, and the connection is the knowing.

She does not tell Clem about the patrons. This is the other side of the silence, the matching silence, the husband and wife each carrying the parish's confidences in separate compartments, Clem carrying the confessions from the barn and the chute and the pasture, Renee carrying the confidences from the library, the things that people say when they are returning books or asking for help with the computer or sitting in the chair by the window reading the obituaries, the things that are said in the library's silence, the silence that invites speech the way Clem's work invites speech, the silence and the work being the two mechanisms by which the parish opens itself to the people who serve it.

The library closes at 5 PM. Renee turns off the computer. She turns off the lights. She locks the door. The building stands on Carter Street the way it has stood since 1911, the brick darkening in the evening light, the boarded windows on the upper floor blank, the library's windows on the lower floor dark, the building holding its 8,000 volumes in the dark the way the river holds its water in the dark, without effort, without intention, the holding being the nature of the thing, the building built to hold and the holding continuing in the dark, the books on the shelves in the dark library holding the words in the dark, the words waiting for the morning when Renee will unlock the door and turn on the lights and the words will be available again, the availability being the library's promise, the promise that the words will be here, that the books will be here, that the library will be here, the here being the thing that the parish needs and that Renee provides and that the providing is the work and the work is the life.

She drives home. Six blocks. The evening is warm. May warm, the warm that is the prelude to the hot, the warm that allows the windows to be open and the porch to be used and the evening to be spent outside, in the air, in the parish's evening air that carries the smell of cut grass and river water and the faint sweetness of the honeysuckle that grows on the fence at the corner of Carter and Main.

Clem is home. His truck is in the driveway. His boots are on the porch. The boots carry the parish's mud, the mud being the evidence of the day's work, the farms visited and the animals touched and the confessions heard, and the mud is the record, and the record is on the porch, and the porch is the threshold between the work and the home.

Renee sees the boots. She has seen the boots every evening for twenty-eight years. She has learned to read the boots the way Clem reads a hoof, the mud and the stains and the wear telling her where he has been and what he has done, though she does not ask for the details and he does not offer them, the details being his to carry, the weight of the parish's confessions being his weight, the weight that he does not share and that Renee does not ask him to share because the asking would be an intrusion, the intrusion into the space between the veterinarian and the parish, the space that is sacred in the way that all confidential spaces are sacred, the sacredness being the trust, and the trust is the practice, and the practice is what the boots have walked through today.

She goes inside. Clem is in the kitchen. He is cooking. This is their arrangement: whoever arrives home first cooks, and Clem arrives home first on the days when his last call is early and Renee arrives home first on the days when the library is quiet and she closes a few minutes before 5. The arrangement is not formal. The arrangement was never discussed. The arrangement emerged from the marriage the way the arrangement of the books on the shelves emerged from the donations, organically, by accretion, the daily practice of two people living together producing the patterns that become the arrangement, the arrangement becoming the marriage, the marriage becoming the life.

He is making rice and gravy. The smell of the roux fills the kitchen, the dark roux that is the foundation of Louisiana cooking, the flour and the oil cooked slowly until the mixture is the color of chocolate, the color being the doneness, the doneness being the taste, the taste being the thing that the nose knows before the tongue knows it, the roux's smell being the smell of home, the smell that says: You are here, you are in the kitchen in the house on Carter Street in Vidalia, Louisiana, and the here is the center, and the center holds.

Renee sets her bag on the counter. The bag contains the things she carries from the library: her keys, her phone, the notebook in which she writes the daily statistics (patrons served, books circulated, computer sessions, the numbers that justify the budget, the numbers that she presents to the parish council each year when the budget is discussed and the library's existence is questioned and Renee stands before the council and says the numbers and the numbers are the argument, and the argument is: We served 4,200 patrons last year, we circulated 6,800 books, we provided 1,200 computer sessions, and the numbers are the evidence, and the evidence is the case, and the case is: Keep us open, we are doing the work, the work matters).

She does not tell Clem about Lily. She does not tell him about Marcus. She does not tell him about Ernest and the obituaries or Genevieve and the romance novels or the hundred small interactions that constitute her day, the day that is the library's life, the library living through Renee and Renee living through the library and the living being the symbiosis, the mutual dependency of the institution and the person, the person giving the institution its life and the institution giving the person her purpose, the purpose being the work, the work being the service, the service being the parish.

They eat dinner. The rice and gravy. The bread from Brookshire's. The sweet tea that Renee makes in the sun, the jar on the porch rail, the tea bags steeping in the Louisiana sun that brews the tea faster and stronger than any kettle, the sun-tea being the parish's beverage, the drink that requires nothing but water and tea and the sun that the parish has in excess.

They eat and they talk about the things that married people talk about, the things that are the surface of the marriage, the schedule and the errands and the daughters, Margaux in Baton Rouge and Colette in New Orleans, the daughters who left the parish for the cities, the leaving being the thing that the parish produces as reliably as it produces soybeans, the young people leaving for the cities where the jobs are, the leaving being the loss, the loss being the parish's perpetual condition, the condition that Renee and Clem live with and within, the condition that is: the parish gives its children to the world and the world does not send them back.

Margaux calls on Sundays. Colette texts. The communication is the connection, the connection that is maintained across the distance that the leaving created, the distance being a hundred miles to Baton Rouge and two hundred miles to New Orleans, the distances that are not far on a map but that are far in the particular geography of the parish, the geography that measures distance not in miles but in frequency of return, and the frequency is: holidays, and the holidays are the calendar's cruelty, the long stretches between the visits being the stretches that the parish endures, the enduring being the condition, the condition being the price of the parish's gift, which is: We raised them. We gave them the library and the school and the church and the parish's particular way of being, which is slow and patient and stubborn and kind, and we gave it to them and they took it and they left, and the leaving is the evidence that the giving worked, because the giving worked so well that the given-to are capable of leaving, capable of building lives elsewhere, and the capability is the gift's proof, and the proof is the absence, and the absence is the price.

Renee clears the dishes. Clem washes. This is another arrangement, another pattern, another piece of the marriage's choreography that was never discussed and never decided but that exists, that is performed every evening, the clearing and the washing, the division of the labor that is the marriage's daily economy, the economy of care, the care expressed not in words but in the doing, the doing being the love, the love being the practice, the practice being the evening in the kitchen on Carter Street.

They sit on the porch. The evening deepens. The parish settles. The sounds of the evening: a dog barking, a truck on the highway, the insects beginning their night chorus, the chorus that is the soundtrack of the Louisiana evening, the sound that Renee has heard for twenty-eight years and that she hears the way she hears the library's fluorescent hum, as background, as the base frequency against which everything else is heard.

Clem sits in his chair. Renee sits in hers. The chairs are wooden rocking chairs that Clem bought at a yard sale in Natchez twelve years ago, the chairs painted green, the green fading, the paint cracking, the chairs bearing the marks of twelve years of evening sitting, the sitting being the marriage's evening ritual, the two chairs and the two people and the porch and the evening and the parish.

Renee knows that Clem carries the parish. She knows this the way she knows most things about Clem, which is through observation, through the twenty-eight years of seeing him leave in the morning and return in the evening, the leaving and the returning being the frame, and within the frame the day, and within the day the work, and within the work the confessions, and within the confessions the weight, and the weight is what she sees when he sits in the chair, the weight in the way he sits, the settling of his body into the chair being the settling of the weight into the evening, the weight that he will carry to bed and carry through the night and carry into the morning when he will leave again and the leaving will add to the weight and the weight will be carried and the carrying will continue until it cannot continue, until the body says: Enough, and the enough is the retirement, and the retirement is years away, and the years between now and the retirement are years of carrying, and the carrying is the marriage's silent burden, the burden that Renee shares by not asking about it, by letting Clem carry it without the additional weight of having to explain it, the not-asking being the gift, the gift that says: I see the weight, I know the weight is there, I will not add to the weight by asking you to describe it, I will sit beside you in the chair on the porch and the sitting-beside is the sharing, and the sharing is enough.

She reaches over. She touches his hand. The touch is brief. The touch is the communication that the marriage has refined to its essence, the touch that contains what words cannot, the touch that says: I am here, I see you, the day was long, the evening is here, the porch is here, the parish is settling, the light is fading, and we are here, the two of us, in the chairs, on the porch, in the town, in the parish, and the being-here is the thing, the only thing, the thing that the day was for, the working and the driving and the carrying and the serving, all of it aimed at this, at the evening, at the porch, at the touch of a hand on a hand, at the silence that is not empty but full, full of thirty years of marriage and twenty-eight years of practice and twenty-eight years of library and two daughters and 8,000 books and 214,000 miles and the parish, the parish that they serve in their separate ways, Clem with his hands and Renee with her shelves, the serving being the life, the life being the evening, the evening being this, the chairs rocking slightly, the porch boards creaking, the parish settling into the night that will hold it until the morning when it all begins again.

The light fades. The streetlight on Carter Street comes on. The light is orange, sodium-vapor, the light that every small town in Louisiana has, the light that casts the shadows that are the evening's decorations, the long shadows of the pecan trees and the fence posts and the trucks in the driveways, the shadows stretching east as the sun sets west, the stretching being the evening's gesture, the day reaching toward the night, the light reaching toward the dark, the reaching being the transition that is not a moment but a duration, the duration of the Louisiana evening, which is long, which is the compensation for the heat, the long evening being the parish's gift to itself, the hours of reduced heat and increased quiet that the parish uses for the porch-sitting and the hand-touching and the not-speaking that is the deepest speaking.

Renee sits. Clem sits. The parish is quiet. The library is dark. The truck is in the driveway. The boots are on the porch. The rice and gravy are in the kitchen, the leftovers in the refrigerator for tomorrow's lunch. The daughters are in their cities. The river is in its channel. The levee holds. The books are on the shelves. The words are in the books. The silence is on the porch. And the silence holds the marriage the way the shelves hold the books, firmly, with the quiet confidence of a structure that was built for holding and that holds.