A Matter of Shelving

Harold Ames does not browse. Harold Ames arrives.

He came in Thursday at ten past nine with a slip of paper in his breast pocket, which meant he had a request, and the request would be exact, and I would spend the next twenty minutes learning more than I ever wanted to know about a subject I'd been perfectly happy not knowing about.

"Good morning, Jess." He removed the slip, unfolded it once, and read from it as though it were a warrant. "I am looking for a book on the history of the sardine canning industry in coastal Maine. Preferably before 1940. Not the Hesketh volume. I have the Hesketh volume."

"I would be shocked if you didn't."

He does not react to this kind of thing. Harold receives a joke the way a stone receives a raindrop—it lands, it is noted, it changes nothing.

I did have something, as it happened. A slim gray thing that had come in with a box of estate books back in the summer and had been sitting on the local-history shelf gathering the particular dust that only local history gathers. I pulled it down and handed it over, and Harold held it at arm's length and examined the spine, the boards, the copyright page, in that order, the way you'd check a horse's teeth.

"1931," he said, with approval. "Second printing. The first printing had an error in the tonnage figures for 1918. This one corrects it."

"Does it."

"It does." He turned to a page in the back without looking, the way some people can find a word in the Bible. "There. You see. Corrected."

I did not see, because the figure meant nothing to me, but I made the face of a person who sees. It's a face I've developed specifically for Harold.

Here is the thing about Harold Ames, though, and the reason I don't mind losing twenty minutes to canned fish. Once he had his book, he did not leave. He set it on the counter, squared it to the edge—Harold cannot abide a book that isn't square to something—and he told me about his grandfather.

His grandfather worked one of the canneries. Harold was small, but he remembered the smell, and the sound of the women's knives, and how his grandmother would send him down to the wharf with a dinner pail and he was not, under any circumstances, to run on the wet planking. He told it plainly, no ornament, the same voice he'd used for the tonnage figures. Facts delivered without being asked. But his hand stayed flat on the cover of the book the whole time he talked, and I understood that the book was not really about sardines at all.

"My grandmother kept a clean house," he said, as if summing up. "You could eat off any surface in it. She'd have approved of your shelving, if it were a little more consistent by date."

"My shelving is by author, Harold."

"I know." A pause. The closest Harold Ames comes to a wink is a very slight settling of the shoulders. "I am registering a complaint for the record."

He paid in exact change, because of course he did, counted onto the counter coin by coin. Then he squared the book to the edge one last time, tucked it under his arm, and left, upright as a lamppost, off to go read corrected tonnage figures in the warm.

Sarah watched him go from behind the poetry section.

"He's kind of wonderful," she said.

He is. I'd never tell him so—he'd only correct me on some detail of it—but he is. There's a whole town in a man like that, if you're patient enough to let him get to it by way of the sardines.

I reshelved the gap he'd left. By author. Some complaints you register; some you decline.