Yet one day I decided to go on with it. I was here in Montford, for he gave me the place and only could have meant for me to live in it. I use a different bedroom to sleep in, of course, and his study room under the gable eave is a place I don’t go. But it had to be his own bathroom mirror I faced each morning, the very place where he shaved and answered his Lord and conscience. Now it was a lady looking back from the glass, and one bright morn I told her: Listen here. If God speaks for the man who keeps quiet, then Violet Brown may be His instrument.
I don’t say it was swift or sure. It took considering. Typing up a manuscript, that I can do. His hand was legible, and errors were few. Putting all in order was no easy trick, but no worse than some card files I’ve seen at the Asheville library. I left nothing out but the things that had no business, a market list or telephone numbers, certain letters. Of his story I have told all, even when it pained me to do it, or passed my understanding. But the question stood everlasting at my shoulder: Was it mine to tell?
This day the telephone could ring and my heart would squeeze, for the thought it might be him, and the answer no. Even as I am a person of the world, and eight years now gone by since I saw him in it. Years do not erase a bereavement. Mr. Shepherd, where be ye? I could still ask. And here is an answer: in those little books. I always could find him there. So this might be nothing very different from the pining girls singing for lost love on the radio. Maybe I turned to typing it for the pleasure of being his daily helpmeet again. Even if that’s so, in the middle of all, the story worked itself ahead of the man. I will say Mr. Shepherd persuaded me, against his own will.
Not in so many words. I did hope for that, some instruction in his text to guide my hand. Well, my stars, the thing was like the Bible—look hard enough in its pages, and you’ll find what you seek. Love your neighbor, or slay him with the jawbone of an ass.
It’s the same herein. He plainly said, Burn these words. He said a mute people will leave behind good stout architecture, and not their squalid lives of trial. Those who come after will be struck by the majesty. He meant to leave behind only the monuments of his books. As he lived and breathed, I saw his wish and I held to that. And then saw the monuments tumble. In this strange, cold time that has settled on us, people did what they could to bury the man and throw everything he’d ever made into the hole they’d dug for him. Like a mummy in Egypt.
His life was a marvel, whether he knew that or didn’t. His way of seeing a cat in a cold wind, or skeletons pressed flat in the dust. A dead fish thrown in the kitchen slop pail. He could cry for about anything and give it a decent burial. He was so afraid of living, yet live he did. That’s a monument. He wrote about those who came before, giving flesh to their cares. He was driven to it.
Now I do the same for him. Even knowing, as I do, how everyone makes firewood from the fallen tree. The professors like to hunt out some sin of Shakespeare himself, and pass that off as the golden store of the learned. I couldn’t bear this to touch Mr. Shepherd, or his loved ones or even children, if such a thing has now come to pass. I want time for him. All the paint washed off, bare limestone revealed.
That is my reason for having it locked up and held. Mr. Gold knew how to fix that up. People at a bank do this very thing, holding documents for a set number of years before hauling it out of the vault for the newspapers or what have you. I told him fifty. I had to choose, and that is a sturdy number. Long enough to be sure we are gone. Yet not so long that I couldn’t imagine people still walking about in shoes, rather than flying on clouds. People who might want to look back on those who labored and birthed the times they have inherited. But maybe that’s wrong, and already we’ll be a graveyard of weeds they won’t want to visit. You, I mean to say. The times you have inherited. I wonder that: Who be ye?
I dread to do what I do now, commending a man’s life into the bleak passage to some other place, be it filled with light or darkness. This is my small raft. I know not what waits on the other side.