eight
years old at the time. To this day, I thought of Abraham’s muscular arms whenever
I struggled to press a book.
I pulled the stool over to the center worktable where I set down the Jules Verne book.
Then I had to go through every drawer in the cluttered room to find Abraham’s standing
magnifying glass. After ten minutes, I finally found it jammed in a cupboard with
his punches and brushes and a myriad of other tools.He’d always been kind of a slob, although he preferred to call himself an unfettered
free spirit.
Under the magnifying glass, the Jules Verne book looked even worse than I’d originally
thought. I could see every little flaw along its spine and knew I would have to reconstruct
it. The six raised bands had become flattened from years of handling, and all the
elaborate gilding had faded away. The crown of the spine was tattered and splitting
away from the front hinge. The morocco leather was in decent condition overall, but
the two leather corners on the front cover had begun to fray along the edges and would
need to be replaced. I anticipated using all new leather on the spine and corners
rather than trying to match what little was worth saving.
Opening the front cover, I could see that the marble endpapers were in remarkably
good condition with no chips or tears. The pattern was a beautiful blend of dark blue
and burgundy swirls and eddies. The flyleaf—those first few blank pages of a book—was
another story. On the front flyleaf, a child had signed his name across the page in
bold, blue ink.
Anton Benoit.
The back flyleaf had suffered much worse abuse. Here, Anton had scrawled a long message
using rust-colored ink. At the end of the message there was a date,
le 6 avril 1906
, and a place,
La Croix Saint-Just, France
. And there were two childish signatures scrawled at the bottom,
Anton Benoit
and
Jean Pierre Renaud
.
Jean Pierre
: The name of the dead man. He’d been a young boy when he signed his name to this
page. What had brought him all the way from France to California? And what had he
been doing here that got him killed? How did he know Guru Bob’s grandfather?
What the heck did it all mean?
The rust-colored ink was uneven and hard to read. Thick andblotched in some spots, scratchy and thin in others, and in a few places, it faded
altogether. I stared at it through the magnifying glass for a long time, holding the
book closer to the lens to figure out what it was about the ink that bothered me.
Abruptly I figured it out and dropped the book in disgust.
��Blood,” I said. “Ew.”
Since I’d grown up with brothers, I knew it made perfect sense that two boys, probably
nine or ten years old, would want to cut their skin open and draw their own blood
to use as ink.
I shook my head. “Idiots.”
The date and the boys’ names were about the extent of my ability to translate the
page of French. The scratchy handwriting didn’t help, but after staring at the immature
penmanship for another minute, I thought I could make out the first phrase,
Nous promettons solennellement
.
“We promise . . . solemnly?” I shrugged. “Close enough.”
It sounded like the two boys were pledging an oath or something to each other.
I tried to recall my high school French, but it wasn’t coming back to me. Some years
ago, I’d memorized a bunch of French phrases for a trip to Paris. Unfortunately, nowhere
in the boys’ message did it say anything about where to find
les toilettes
, so that didn’t help, either.
Reminding myself of the book’s subject matter, I wondered if maybe Anton and Jean
Pierre had pledged to make their own journey to the center of the earth. Since I had
lived with two brothers, this sounded like something a couple of boys might vow to
do after reading an enthralling adventure story.
But did they really have to destroy the value of this book by writing all over it?
Yes, of course they did.
Learning to Kill: Stories