Jesse in the Stacks

Jesse retired on the last Friday of October. She had been the librarian at the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield for thirty-two years, and on her last day she shelved returns by hand the way she had shelved returns on her first day, the books lifted from the cart and placed on the shelf in their correct position, the spine facing out, the call number visible, the book in its place, the system maintained until the last hour.

Wren came to help her clean out her office. The office was a small room behind the circulation desk, the room that Jesse had occupied for three decades, the desk and the chair and the filing cabinet and the window that looked out on the side garden, the garden that Jesse had maintained as an extension of her office, the herbs and the perennials planted in the beds along the wall, the garden visible from the desk, the garden a piece of the outside world that Jesse could tend from the inside, the librarian gardening through the window, the relationship between the books and the plants a relationship between two kinds of records — the books recording human knowledge and the plants recording the seasons, both organized, both requiring maintenance, both deteriorating without care.

The office was spare. Jesse had never been a person who accumulated — the desk was clear except for a cup of pens and a pad of paper and the reading glasses that she kept on a chain around her neck. The filing cabinet had three drawers. The shelves had reference books — the Library of Congress classification manual, the Connecticut library regulations, the annual budget reports, the back issues of Library Journal that Jesse had saved because she said the Journal was the only periodical worth reading, the rest being noise.

"What are you keeping?" Wren said.

"The pens. The glasses. Nothing else."

"Thirty-two years and you're leaving with a cup of pens."

"I came with a cup of pens. It seems appropriate."

Wren opened the filing cabinet. The top drawer was administrative — budgets, personnel files, correspondence with the town, the paperwork of a public institution funded by taxes and maintained by one person who understood that the paperwork was the price of the books and the books were the reason for the paperwork.

The second drawer was acquisitions — lists of books ordered and received, the records of thirty-two years of collection development, the titles and authors and publishers and prices, each book that entered the Oliver Wolcott Library passing through Jesse's decision, Jesse choosing what the library would contain, Jesse curating the collection the way a forester curated a stand, selecting which trees to keep and which to thin, the library a managed forest of knowledge, the stacks a canopy of spines, the books reaching for the reader the way the branches reached for the light.

The third drawer was something else.

Wren opened it and found notebooks. Small notebooks — the Moleskine type, black covers, the pages ruled, each notebook the size of a hand. There were dozens of them. She picked one up and opened it.

Jesse's handwriting — small, precise, the letters formed with the care of a person who valued legibility the way she valued punctuality, the writing a form of respect for the future reader, the letters clear enough to be read in thirty years by someone who was not Jesse, the handwriting an act of communication across time, the words addressed not to the present but to the afterward.

The entry was dated. March 17, 2019.

Wren called. She has a new client — an elm in Litchfield, Dutch elm disease. She described the staining in the sapwood, the vascular discoloration, the diagnosis from the increment core. She said the tree is a hundred years old. She said the owner's father planted it, or says he did. She said the rings tell a different story than the owner's memory. She was precise about the science and silent about the feeling. She has Glenn's precision and my silence. I don't know which one worries me more.

Wren stopped reading. She stood at the filing cabinet in her mother's office with the notebook in her hand and the words on the page and the realization that Jesse had been keeping a record.

She looked at the drawer. The notebooks were arranged in order — chronological, the earliest at the back, the most recent at the front, the system the same system Jesse used for the library's records, the chronological order the natural order of a librarian's mind, the past at the back and the present at the front and the time flowing from back to front the way the rings flowed from center to bark.

She picked up the earliest notebook. The first entry was dated September 2, 1996. The year Wren had started college. The year Jesse had been left alone in the Cape Cod in Litchfield with the box in the basement and the silence and the library and the garden and the thirty-seven years of life remaining that she did not yet know were remaining but that she would fill with the work and the notebooks and the watching of her daughter from a distance that was both chosen and regretted.

Wren left for school today. The house is empty. The emptiness is different from the emptiness after Glenn — that emptiness was a wound, a void where a person had been. This emptiness is a graduation, a departure, the house fulfilling its purpose and then being vacated, the way a seed pod fulfills its purpose and then opens and the seed goes. I should be proud. I am proud. I am also aware that the house contains one person now and that the one person is the person who sealed the box and sealed the silence and that the sealing worked — Wren left without knowing and the not knowing was my gift to her, the gift of a childhood without the weight of the details, and the gift was also a theft, the theft of the father's full story, and I do not know if the gift outweighs the theft.

Wren closed the notebook. She did not read more. She stood at the filing cabinet and held the notebook and felt the weight of it — not the physical weight, which was a few ounces, but the weight of the fact that Jesse had been writing about her for thirty-two years, that Jesse had been keeping a record of Wren's life as seen from the library office, the mother watching the daughter from behind the circulation desk, the watching recorded in the notebooks, the notebooks in the drawer, the drawer in the office, the office in the library, the library in the town, the town in the hills, the hills in the landscape that Wren climbed trees in while Jesse wrote about the climbing in the notebooks.

Jesse was in the doorway. She was holding her cup of pens and her reading glasses and she was looking at the notebook in Wren's hand and her face was the face of a person who had been expecting this moment and had not decided how to feel about it.

"How many?" Wren said.

"Thirty-nine notebooks. One for most years. Some years I wrote more."

"You've been writing about me."

"I've been writing about everything. You're in them because you're in my life. The library is in them. The weather is in them. The garden is in them. The town is in them. You're the largest presence but you're not the only presence."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Jesse set the pens and the glasses on the desk. She sat in the chair — her chair, the chair she had sat in for thirty-two years, the chair that had the shape of her body in the cushion, the seat a negative of her form, the chair knowing her the way a tree knew the wind, by the constant pressure. She sat in the chair for the last time and she looked at Wren and she said, "Because the writing was for me. The writing was how I thought. The writing was how I understood what was happening. You were growing up and then you were an adult and then you were an arborist and I didn't understand any of it — I didn't understand the climbing and the cutting and the chainsaws and the choice to do the work that had killed your father. I didn't understand it but I could write about it and the writing was the understanding. The writing was how I processed the fact that my daughter had chosen the trees."

"Did you want me to find them?"

"I wanted you to have them. I didn't know how to give them to you. Handing someone thirty-nine notebooks and saying here is what I thought about your life for thirty-two years — that's not a gift. That's a burden. Or a gift that looks like a burden. I was going to leave them for you. After."

"After."

"After I was gone. The way Glenn's box was left. The way records are left. The way the rings are left in the stump after the tree is cut. The record survives the recorder. That's how records work. That's what I know about records. I've been a librarian for thirty-two years. The books survive the writers. The records survive the recorders. The notebooks would survive me and you would find them and you would read them and the reading would be the conversation we never had, the conversation we never needed to have because we had other conversations — the dinners and the tea and the bagels and the weekly presence of a mother and a daughter who loved each other and did not need to say so because the saying was in the showing."

"Mom."

"Don't cry. I'm not crying. This is a fact, not an emotion. The notebooks are a record. Records are what I do. You keep increment cores in a drawer. I keep notebooks in a filing cabinet. We are both keeping records. We are both preserving evidence. The evidence is the same — the evidence is time. Your cores record the time of the tree. My notebooks record the time of us. Both records are incomplete. Both records are better than no record."

Wren sat on the edge of the desk. She held the notebook. She did not open it again. The notebook was closed and the words inside were Jesse's and the words would be there when Wren was ready to read them and the readiness would come when it came and the notebook would wait because notebooks were patient, notebooks did not decay the way wood decayed, notebooks did not rot from the center the way heartwood rotted, the paper and the ink durable in a dry drawer, the record stable, the words fixed.

"Take them," Jesse said. "Take all of them. Put them in your drawer with the cores. The cores and the notebooks — they belong together. The trees' record and the mother's record, side by side, the two ways of keeping time, the two testimonies."

Wren took the notebooks. She put them in a box — a library box, a banker's box, the kind of box that libraries used to store archives, the box sturdy, acid-free, designed for preservation, the box a container for records that were meant to last. She carried the box to the truck. She went back inside and helped Jesse finish cleaning out the office — the filing cabinet emptied, the desk cleared, the shelves stripped of the reference books, the room becoming what it had been before Jesse occupied it, which was an empty room in a library, a room waiting for the next person, the next thirty-two years, the next record.

They walked through the library on the way out. The stacks were quiet — the afternoon light coming through the tall windows, the dust motes floating in the light shafts, the books on the shelves in their rows, the spines facing out, the call numbers visible, the system that Jesse had maintained for thirty-two years intact, the order preserved, the knowledge organized, the library ready for the next librarian the way a well-pruned tree was ready for the next arborist, the work of the predecessor visible in the structure, the care visible in the condition, the love visible in the maintenance.

Jesse stopped at the circulation desk. She put her hand on the surface — the wood surface, the desk built from maple, the grain visible under the finish, the finish worn at the place where Jesse's hands had rested while checking out books, the surface recording the contact the way bark recorded contact, the wear a form of evidence, the evidence of thirty-two years of a woman standing at a desk and handing books to people who wanted to read.

"Maple," Wren said, looking at the desk.

"Sugar maple," Jesse said. "Acer saccharum. The same species as the trees on South Street."

Wren looked at her mother. Jesse looked back. The look between them was the look of recognition — the daughter recognizing that the mother knew the trees, had always known the trees, had known them not from climbing and cutting and coring but from reading about them, from the books in the library, from the field guides and the dendrology texts and the silviculture manuals that were on the shelves of the Oliver Wolcott Library because Jesse had ordered them, Jesse had added them to the collection, Jesse had curated the library's holdings in forestry and arboriculture and tree biology with the specific attention of a librarian who had a personal reason to understand trees, the personal reason being a daughter who climbed them and a husband who had been killed by one.

"You knew all along," Wren said. "You knew the species. You knew the biology. You've been reading about trees for years."

"I've been reading about trees since you picked up the chainsaw. I couldn't ask you about the work. I couldn't talk about the work. The work was Glenn's work and Glenn's work was the thing I couldn't talk about. But I could read about it. I could understand it from the books. The books were safe. The books didn't smell like bar oil. The books didn't make the sound of the saw. The books gave me the knowledge without the sensory triggers, the understanding without the memory, the information about the trees without the presence of the trees."

"A library is a forest without the weather."

"Yes. That's exactly what a library is."

They walked out. The October afternoon was bright, the light golden, the sugar maples on the green in full color, the red and orange and yellow blazing in the afternoon sun, the trees performing the annual display that drew the tourists and the photographers and that Jesse had watched from the library window for thirty-two years, the trees visible from the circulation desk, the trees framed by the tall windows, the trees the view that Jesse had looked at while she shelved and cataloged and ordered and maintained, the trees the constant in the window while the books changed and the patrons changed and the years changed.

They stood on the library steps and looked at the green and the trees and the steeple of the Congregational church and the white houses and the road and the cars and the people walking and the town doing what it did on a Friday afternoon in October, which was to be a town, to function, to continue, the continuity the thing that the trees provided and the library provided and the mothers provided, the standing and the shelving and the caring, the daily maintenance of the things that lasted.

"What are you going to do?" Wren said.

"Read," Jesse said. "I'm going to read. Not for the library. For myself. All the books I've been shelving for thirty-two years that I haven't read. I'm going to sit in the chair by the window and read."

"What about the garden?"

"The garden too. The garden and the reading. The two things that grow."

Wren drove Jesse home. She carried the box of pens and glasses into the house and set it on the kitchen table. She hugged her mother — the embrace brief, the arms around each other for three seconds, four, the physical contact that they rarely made and that felt, in this moment, necessary, the bodies touching the way the bodies of the trees touched in the canopy, the branches overlapping, the crowns interleaving, the two organisms sharing the space at the boundary where one ended and the other began.

She drove home with the banker's box of notebooks on the passenger seat. She drove through the hills and the color and the October light and she thought about records — the cores in the drawer and the notebooks in the box and the rings in the trees and the words in the notebooks, the records accumulating, the evidence building, the testimony of the trees and the testimony of the mother, both stored in the same house, both kept by the same person, both waiting to be read by someone who would come later and would find them and would hold them up to the light and would try to understand what had happened here, in this place, in this time, in the years when the trees were growing and the mother was writing and the daughter was climbing and cutting and reading the rings.

She got home. She opened the kitchen drawer — the drawer of cores — and she found that the drawer was full. The hundred and forty-seven cores and Glenn's ring and the Polaroid filled the drawer to the brim. There was no room for thirty-nine notebooks.

She looked at the drawer. She looked at the box. She looked at the kitchen bureau with its four drawers on the right side. The second drawer was the cores. The third drawer was empty. She opened the third drawer and placed the notebooks inside, the thirty-nine Moleskines arranged in chronological order, the earliest at the back, the most recent at the front, the system the same as the cores above, the time flowing from back to front, the records stacked, the cores above the notebooks, the trees above the words, the two records in two drawers in the same bureau, the bureau a filing cabinet, the filing cabinet a library, the library a forest of records, the records the evidence of lives lived in one place for a long time, the standing and the growing and the reading and the writing, all of it recorded, all of it preserved, all of it waiting in the drawers for the person who would come and open them and read.