The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald Read Free Book Online Page A

once have a mobile library on a cargo moped. Miss Annie, our schoolteacher, decided to start a school library and take it out to the community every Saturday. There were never many books, and those we did have got in a complete mess on the moped Miss Annie drove. But what adventures! I borrowed
Little Women
from there, I suppose the good Louisa’s slightly sanctimonious tone was a good fit, and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
too, which I think must have been a mistake on their part. A lot of people in Broken Wheel had abolitionists in their family, but I don’t think they realized just how liberal the values I picked up from Harriet Beecher Stowe were. For some people, there’s a hair’s breadth between Christianity, Liberalism and Communism. There was a copy of the Bible too, naturally, but I’d already read those stories by that point.
    Book lending in town survived until the school itself closed. But the school library hadn’t been the same toward the end in any case, when we were given a government grant for buying in prescribed books. There’s something uninspiring about school libraries, I think. Class editions of twenty copies of the same book, as though everyone should be reading the same thing, and that special scent of obligation that goes along with it. We’ve never been a town of readers. We’re too practical, I guess. You’ve got to be something of a dreamer to enjoy books, at least to begin with. But I suppose it’s different in slightly bigger towns. There was a library in Hope, but never a bookstore. There’s something strange about a town which has three stores selling home furnishings but no bookstore, don’t you think? Hope, that is. We don’t have a single home furnishing store here, not since Molly’s Corner closed, but she only sold porcelain figurines anyway.
    A good friend of mine, Caroline Rohde, was just here. She’s very nice, but very active in the church. She tells me that we’ve got a kind of bookstore there, since the Bible Society (Caroline is chair of their division in Broken Wheel) has a room in the parish house. They’ve got twenty Bibles that you can buy for five dollars each, or take for free if you can prove you don’t have one at home.
    Excuse my long-windedness. I’m under orders to stay in bed at the moment and I’ve got much too much time to feel the need to express myself concisely.
    There’s not so much to say about my own life, but it’s kind of you to ask. When I was younger, I was convinced that all old folks had a dramatic life story of their own. I think it’s because I grew up in the countryside. All the families around here seem to have their dark secrets, unexplained pregnancies, near-misses with tractors and combine harvesters, or natural disasters. Often of biblical proportions, sometimes literally, like in 1934 and 1935 when we were hit by swarms of grasshoppers. But nowadays, our lives seem so ordinary. I’m much more interested in our youngsters’ lives – now
there’s
some drama.
    There aren’t so many young people left in town nowadays, of course, and those that I see as ‘mine’ are all grown up by now. My youngsters are those who were young when I was already an adult. Claire, Andy and Tom are all over thirty now. Tom is my nephew, my brother Robert’s son. Claire has a daughter who is seventeen, one of those unexplained pregnancies. I don’t think it was Tom, I’ve never believed that, but I’ve wondered whether it might’ve been Andy. Though he moved to Denver at around the same time (there were some people who thought that was a bit suspect – sometimes I think his father spread that rumor deliberately, not that it helped him in the long run). Andy came back with a very good friend called Carl, who is very nice despite the fact that he’s almost unbearably handsome. There aren’t many people I’d forgive for that