Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and Shakespeare.
Seeing my frustration, she put down Paradise Lost. From her backpack she pulled out a wrapped gift-about the size of a thick book-and put it behind her back. She led me from the table and pulled me between the rows of bookshelves where the librarian couldn't see us. Surrounded by thousands of years of knowledge stacked high on either side, the best that the Western world and modern medicine could accumulate, Emma tapped me on the sternum and showed me that she-who had never read any of them-knew more than all of them added together.
She brushed my hair out of my eyes and placed her palm flat across my chest and said, "Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you're going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can't just fix the one with no concern for the other." She smiled and placed my hand across her heart. "I should know."
She pulled the book from behind her back and held it to my chest, then she walked away and left me holding the gift. I peeled off the wrapper to find the complete works of William Shakespeare.
In the months that followed, Emma made sure that we read aloud from my copy of Shakespeare. Eventually, we began speak ing to each other in the lines we remembered. Emma was much better at it than I. We did it so much that even Charlie-who was sick of hearing us speak the King's sixteenth-century Englishlearned to play.
One Saturday afternoon the three of us were going to a movie. When Emma saw me coming, she threw up her hands and said, "0 Hamlet! Thou hast cleft my heart in twain."
Charlie looked over his shoulder and said, "Oh, brother!"
Without skipping a beat, I hopped up on the front steps and knelt, taking her hand in mine, and said, "0! Throw away the worser part of it, and live the purer with the other half."
And to this day, I wish the same.
Chapter 18
our neon beer signs hung in the window of The Well in full Friday night glow. Atop the apex of the roof, a neon strip of lights outlined a well-endowed woman wearing nothing but high heels and a cowboy hat.
The Well is an anomaly in Clayton. As out of place as a baseball in a football game, or a poker chip in church. The structure itself was built from huge stones pulled from the shoreline around Lake Burton. Some of the stones are as big as beach balls. They've been squared, mounded together, and piled atop one another to form walls that at a minimum are two feet thick. The roof is built from huge rough-cut cedar timbers and draped with cedar shakes that are nearly covered in moss. The moss hangs down, accenting the huge front door that was once the loading door on a steamer in the North Sea. The door is six inches thick, nearly eight feet square, made from planks that are almost a foot in width and held together with three thick iron straps. It hangs on runners and must be slid open and closed by a very strong person.
The place was built in the fifties by a hermit who must have been afraid of nuclear war with Cuba, because the cellar was just as stout as the building above it. Dug down into the rock, it became the county's fallout shelter after the hermit hopped on the Appalachian Trail one afternoon and walked to Maine with his dog, never to be seen or heard from again. Due to its stone construction, The Well stays cool all summer, and thanks to its sixfoot-wide fireplace, warm all winter.
It sat vacant for years until Davis Stipes got hold of it. And Davis, or Monk, as we call him, is as much a mystery as the former owner's disappearance. Davis is forty-something and likes Hawaiian shirts, cut-off jeans, flip-flops, and the fact that very few people suspect him of holding a doctorate in theology. In truth, he holds two. A military brat, he was born in England where his dad was stationed with the SAS. He's traveled more than most anyone I know, attended universities and
Seeing my frustration, she put down Paradise Lost. From her backpack she pulled out a wrapped gift-about the size of a thick book-and put it behind her back. She led me from the table and pulled me between the rows of bookshelves where the librarian couldn't see us. Surrounded by thousands of years of knowledge stacked high on either side, the best that the Western world and modern medicine could accumulate, Emma tapped me on the sternum and showed me that she-who had never read any of them-knew more than all of them added together.
She brushed my hair out of my eyes and placed her palm flat across my chest and said, "Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you're going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can't just fix the one with no concern for the other." She smiled and placed my hand across her heart. "I should know."
She pulled the book from behind her back and held it to my chest, then she walked away and left me holding the gift. I peeled off the wrapper to find the complete works of William Shakespeare.
In the months that followed, Emma made sure that we read aloud from my copy of Shakespeare. Eventually, we began speak ing to each other in the lines we remembered. Emma was much better at it than I. We did it so much that even Charlie-who was sick of hearing us speak the King's sixteenth-century Englishlearned to play.
One Saturday afternoon the three of us were going to a movie. When Emma saw me coming, she threw up her hands and said, "0 Hamlet! Thou hast cleft my heart in twain."
Charlie looked over his shoulder and said, "Oh, brother!"
Without skipping a beat, I hopped up on the front steps and knelt, taking her hand in mine, and said, "0! Throw away the worser part of it, and live the purer with the other half."
And to this day, I wish the same.
Chapter 18
our neon beer signs hung in the window of The Well in full Friday night glow. Atop the apex of the roof, a neon strip of lights outlined a well-endowed woman wearing nothing but high heels and a cowboy hat.
The Well is an anomaly in Clayton. As out of place as a baseball in a football game, or a poker chip in church. The structure itself was built from huge stones pulled from the shoreline around Lake Burton. Some of the stones are as big as beach balls. They've been squared, mounded together, and piled atop one another to form walls that at a minimum are two feet thick. The roof is built from huge rough-cut cedar timbers and draped with cedar shakes that are nearly covered in moss. The moss hangs down, accenting the huge front door that was once the loading door on a steamer in the North Sea. The door is six inches thick, nearly eight feet square, made from planks that are almost a foot in width and held together with three thick iron straps. It hangs on runners and must be slid open and closed by a very strong person.
The place was built in the fifties by a hermit who must have been afraid of nuclear war with Cuba, because the cellar was just as stout as the building above it. Dug down into the rock, it became the county's fallout shelter after the hermit hopped on the Appalachian Trail one afternoon and walked to Maine with his dog, never to be seen or heard from again. Due to its stone construction, The Well stays cool all summer, and thanks to its sixfoot-wide fireplace, warm all winter.
It sat vacant for years until Davis Stipes got hold of it. And Davis, or Monk, as we call him, is as much a mystery as the former owner's disappearance. Davis is forty-something and likes Hawaiian shirts, cut-off jeans, flip-flops, and the fact that very few people suspect him of holding a doctorate in theology. In truth, he holds two. A military brat, he was born in England where his dad was stationed with the SAS. He's traveled more than most anyone I know, attended universities and
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