Chapter Seven
Lottie learned on Tuesday morning a library could attract three sorts of people:
Those who wanted books. Those who wanted to argue about books. Finally, there were those who wanted to see whether Peterson had truly borrowed poetry.
The first group was small but precious.
The second group was mostly Mrs. Hanford.
The third group arrived from the camps before noon and made themselves comfortable near the door with all the subtlety of boys peering through a bakery window.
Lottie noticed them at once.
Three loggers stood just inside the meeting hall, hats in hand, boots dusty from the camp road, trying very hard to appear uninterested in the shelves.
One was Jack from the cookhouse, whom she already knew by voice and grin.
Another was Peter Olsen, who had borrowed the fishing book and returned to say, with great seriousness, that page thirty-two had useful information and page forty was “mostly nonsense.” The third she did not know, though he had a reddish beard and the pleased look of a man hoping to witness entertainment.
Peterson was not with them.
Lottie told herself she had not looked for him the moment the door opened. Then she told herself other things equally unconvincing and returned to arranging the children’s books on the lowest shelf.
The first shelf had held through the night.
She had checked it twice that morning. Not because she doubted Peterson’s work, but because it pleased her to touch the smooth edge of the plank and remember he had put it there.
Bible, primer, botany, Shakespeare, Dickens, and The Moonstone stood in neat company.
The empty space where Tennyson had been made her smile each time she saw it.
Not missing. Borrowed.
There was a difference.
Cornelia had gone back to the schoolhouse after helping with the early sorting. Delly had stopped by only long enough to inspect the ledger, straighten the salt-and-sand jar they were using to dry ink, and ask Lottie whether she had slept.
“I slept,” Lottie had said.
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the beginning of one.”
Delly had narrowed her eyes. “You are learning bad habits from loggers.”
“From your husband, perhaps.”
That had sent a little color into Delly’s cheeks, and Lottie considered the morning well begun.
Now Delly was gone, likely up toward the camp with Mr. Simms’s dinner pail, because married life had apparently made her sister both more practical and less predictable.
Lottie found that comforting. If Delly could be surprised by her own heart, perhaps everyone else had permission to be less certain too.
Jack cleared his throat near the doorway.
Lottie turned. “Good morning.”
“Mornin’, Miss Bellamy.” Jack held his hat in both hands and looked toward the shelf with exaggerated seriousness. “We come to inspect the progress of civilization.”
“That is an enormous responsibility for three men before dinner.”
Olsen nodded. “Told him that.”
The red-bearded logger leaned against the doorframe. “Heard Peterson’s got himself signed up for the book.”
“He has borrowed a book, yes.”
“Poetry,” Jack said, as if announcing a rare medical condition.
“Tennyson,” Lottie corrected.
“That worse?”
“Not unless one is afraid of feelings.”
Olsen looked at Jack. “Told you not to start.”
Lottie tucked a smile away and reached for the ledger. “Would any of you like to borrow something?”
Jack took one step back. “Didn’t come for that.”
“Civilization often surprises people.”
The red-bearded man laughed. “You sound like Peterson’s ma.”
Jack cut the red-bearded man a quick look, and Olsen suddenly became very interested in a splinter on the doorframe. Lottie set down the ledger more carefully than necessary.
Peterson’s mother.
She had never thought about his mother. Of course, he had one.
Every man did or had. In her mind, Peterson had arrived in Wild Rose Ridge fully formed from pine, silence, and bad weather.
The idea of him as a boy, of a woman fussing over his hair or calling him to supper, unsettled something tender in her.
“What was she like?” Lottie asked before wisdom could stop her.
The red-bearded man shrugged. “Wouldn’t know. Heard old Tucker mention once she called him Cecil. That true, Jack?”
Jack’s smile appeared and vanished. “Leave it.”
Cecil.
The name landed softly.
It did not seem to belong to the man who stood in doorways with his hand hidden, or who made careful shelving lists, or who warned her not to build too much from borrowed hope.
It sounded gentler than Peterson. Younger too.
A name spoken over a cradle, written in a Bible, called across a yard in summer.
Cecil Peterson.
Lottie liked it at once. Then she saw Jack’s face and understood liking it did not mean she had the right to use it.
The red-bearded logger noticed too late the room had not followed his amusement. He pushed away from the doorframe. “Well, we ought to get back before the boss has our hides.”
“You never borrowed a thing,” Olsen said.
“I borrowed the sight of a shelf. That’s enough education for one day.”
They left with more noise than purpose. Lottie remained behind the lending table with Peterson’s ledger entry open before her.
PETERSON.
Only Peterson.
She touched the blank space after the name with the end of the pencil, then pulled her hand back. It was not hers to fill.
The day warmed as it went on. By early afternoon, Mrs. Beck had brought cookies “for library encouragement,” which proved successful with children and deeply suspicious to Delly when she passed the door on her way toward the camp road.
“You are bribing readers,” Delly said.
“I am nourishing them.”
“That is what bribery often says when it comes in a napkin.”
Lottie took a cookie and handed it to her. “For your husband.”
Delly looked at it as if it were an argument wrapped in sugar. “He may not like cookies.”
“He likes pie.”
“That is documented.”
“Then document a cookie.”
Delly accepted it, though she tried not to look pleased.
Not long after, a call came from the direction of the camp. It was distant, carried thin by the wind, but sharp enough the two boys on the meeting hall steps stopped their game. A second shout followed. Then the sound of running feet on the road.
Lottie went to the door.
“Someone’s hurt,” one boy said, and darted toward the street before she could ask how he knew.
The town seemed to hear the news before the news had words. A man ran past toward Dr. Paine’s office. Mrs. Schulte crossed herself and started toward the church. Lottie stood in the doorway with one hand against the frame and thought of Delly carrying a dinner pail toward the camp.
Peterson appeared at the bend in the road.
He was walking fast toward the meeting hall, a nail box in his left hand. He stopped when the runner reached him. The boy pointed uphill, talking too quickly for Lottie to hear. Peterson’s head turned toward the camp.
He set the nail box on the boardwalk and started back the way he had come.
“Mr. Peterson!”
He looked over his shoulder.
“Is it bad?”
“Likely.”
“Is Delly there?”
“I don’t know.” The honest answer did not help. It was better than a false one, but only barely. Peterson hesitated, then came back two steps. “Simms is there.”
Those three words were meant as comfort. Lottie knew they were. He had given her what he could spare in the middle of an alarm.
She held on to them.
“Thank you.”
He nodded and turned again.
“Cecil.”
The name left her mouth before she could call it back. Peterson stopped. So did the two men passing the mercantile. So did Luke, who had come running from the cookhouse road and was close enough to hear.
Lottie knew the mistake the instant she saw Luke’s expression.
His grin came first, quick and foolish. “Who’s Cecil?”
Peterson did not turn around.
The red-bearded logger from earlier, appearing behind Luke, gave a low whistle. “Hear that? Miss Bellamy’s found your Sunday name.”
Luke laughed, but there was uncertainty in it now, as if he knew he had stepped onto ground that might not hold. “Never thought I’d hear that name outside a hymnbook.”
Lottie’s cheeks burned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
Peterson turned then. He did not look at the men.
He looked at her.
There was no anger in his eyes. Anger would have been easier to bear. This was worse: a flat hurt, quickly shuttered, as if he had expected better from the world but not for very long.
“Peterson,” he said.
One word.
Then he went up the camp road.
The men stopped laughing.
Luke took off his hat and dragged one hand through his hair. “Miss, I—”
“Don’t,” Lottie said, lifting her hand to block them.
Her voice came out calm enough to surprise her.
Luke swallowed. “We didn’t mean harm.”
“No,” she said. “That seems to be how harm slips through.”
She went back into the meeting hall because if she stood outside one moment longer, she would cry in the street, and she had not crossed half a continent to provide entertainment to men with more mouth than sense.
Inside, the little library looked exactly as it had before. That felt unfair. The shelf stood straight. The books waited. Mrs. Beck’s cookies sat in a covered tin. Peterson’s name remained in the ledger, unchanged by her clumsy tongue.
Lottie sat at the lending table and pressed both hands together in her lap.
She had not meant to hurt him.
It also undid nothing.
For the next hour, she tried to work. She lent the primer to a young mother and helped a boy find the page on river fish for his father. She received a donated copy of Pilgrim’s Progress from Mrs. Hanford, who said it ought to be placed “where it can improve people without being overly handled.”
Every time the door opened, Lottie looked up.
Peterson did not come back.
Near supper, Delly entered the meeting hall with dust on her skirt and the pale, tired look of a woman who had seen blood and refused to be conquered by it.
Lottie rose at once. “Are you well? Is Mr. Simms?”