An Imperfect Librarian by Elizabeth Murphy

platter on top of the stove then takes off her oven mitts. “I’ll have a talk with him. I’m sure if he sees you there again, he’ll treat you like one of the neighbours.”
    â€œIs Walter your neighbour?”
    â€œWalter lives next door in our old house. We moved there from the south coast when I was a teenager. Originally, he was one of my father’s pupils. He took care of my grandmother and then my father until he died. He helps me around the property, ploughing my road in the winter, cutting hay in the fall, preparing the garden in the spring.”
    â€œHas your father been dead long?”
    She passes me two six-sided plates and two six-sided glasses for water. “Help me set the table. I’ll tell you about him while we eat.”
    She’s the third person besides Edith or Mercedes and Cyril to invite me for a meal. I’ve had every type of delicacy including figgy duff, bakeapple bunts, caribou stir-fry, stuffed moose heart, fish and brewis, and barbequed cod tongues. This is my first arctic char in phyllo pastry with a partridgeberry-cognac sauce. We sit at the table. Steam rises off the fish. While I was in the shower, she changed into a sleeveless t-shirt with track pants. She’s not wearing a–
    â€œIf my father was here,” she says, “you’d see the biggest man with the smallest voice, the most exhausted eyes from reading all the time, the most passionate intellect. Talk about superlatives. Reading was a religion to him, something he worshipped and proselytized about.” She serves me then runs back and forth to the fridge or cupboard for things she forgot to put on the table.
    â€œWhen you meet someone new for the first time, you’ll typically ask: ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘What do you do?’ William, Will for short, would ask, ‘What are you reading now?’ So, Carl, what are you reading?”

    â€œ Robinson Crusoe .”
    She holds up her glass of wine like she’s toasting. “Will would have approved. He would have quoted from it or launched into a lecture on first-person narratives. You’d wonder if you were sitting in an English class listening to an absentminded professor.”
    It’s not easy to eat with the dogs staring at me through the glass door in the porch, drooling for table scraps. “He would have made a good librarian.”
    â€œLibraries weren’t common in outport Newfoundland, especially in the small communities where Will and his mother lived.”
    â€œA bibliophile with no books?”
    â€œHe had books. Only a few at first, thousands eventually. His mother, Esther, was a midwife.”
    â€œShe gave birth to books?”
    She pours more wine. “You could say that. The island’s birth rate was one of the highest in the world back then. Esther travelled on coastal boats to communities where her services were needed. Will was always in tow. Most of the time, they paid her in-kind with firewood, plenty of eggs, vegetables, game, fish. Sometimes, in exchange for a service, she’d ask for a book or two. That’s how Will became a collector.”
    â€œIs your mother still living?”
    She gets up from the table then goes to the porch to let the dogs outside. A draft of cold air flows into the room. She sits at the table again. “Will didn’t really want children, not after spending so much time with a midwife. That’s why he married my mother. She was a widow, ten years older. She couldn’t have children, or so they thought. She passed away when I was young. He brought a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the hospital. Baptism by books. Before I turned seven, I had over six hundred.”
    â€œYou’re like Matilda in Roald Dahl’s book. She read all of Dickens before she turned five.”
    â€œI can’t claim the same, although I did have the largest collection of children’s books in any