The Risk Pool

reading or to tell me in advance what to make of it, there was the off chance that I would go in a new direction. I often chose books by smell and was often rewarded. Sometimes I would look inside the back cover, where I would find a borrowers’ history, due dates stamped in purple ink. Volumes that had not been checked out in twenty or thirty years held a special interest for me. I felt like I was in direct communication with the book’s lonely author, that I would not have to raise my voice to be heard above the clamor of recent due dates.
    I now felt a similar intimacy with Tria’s grandfather, whose various relics made him a palpable presence in that icon-riddled room. I liked the idea that a man, many years ago, had labored over writings that I now labored over, that I could look inside his mind, see what occupied his thoughts, or at least those thoughts he chose to share with the world. And I wondered what he would have thought of me, a young man he couldn’t have imagined or predicted, who entered his house, and twisted his sentences around until they suited himself. At the time I imagined that the author must be terribly grateful.
    And I did love twisting those sentences around. It’s a pleasure that I fear very few people can comprehend, much less share. Surgeons who perform intricate operations that allow twisted, maimed, hulking cripples to walk upright may know something of the editor’s delight. I can only say that I discovered that summer in working over—and brother did I ever work it over—
The History of Mohawk County
, the joy of probing the opaque sentence until it surrendered something akin to meaning (
this
is what the son of a bitch meant!), making flexible (sometimes loosey-goosey, I fear) that which had been soldered stiff in a grimace of contorted syntax, giving energy and momentum to sentences stalled and flooded, like a carburetor, by leaden words. I was having a ball, and I do not regret in the least the many hours I labored over
The History of Mohawk County
. In fact, I didn’t even regret it years later when I saw a display of the book in the small front window of Ford’s Stationers, the closest Mohawk ever came to a bookstore. Having been rejected by dozens of commercial and university publishers, Mrs. Ward had somehow managed to convince a local press to do a limited edition. The editor, perhaps on his own initiative or, more likely, on the advice of thegood Mrs. Ward herself, restored to the original every one of the thousand or so editorial changes I made, offering to the book-reading public of Mohawk County, her father’s vision, complete, unmolested, faithful, and, trust me, utterly unreadable.
    Seeing the modest edition, every copy of which was displayed in Ford’s window, unless there was a carton or two in the den of the Ward house, made me feel sad for Tria’s mother, because her plan for her father’s work was nothing less than grandiose. I learned of it gradually that summer when she became the companion of my evenings. Meeting me at the front door, she would insist that I have “something cool, you know” before I sat down to work. Then she would tell me about her father, who seemed to me, even as Mrs. Ward described him, nearly as frozen as his syntax. That she worshiped him beyond measure was evident. That his ghost had intruded into her and her husband’s bedroom seemed to me both then and now as the safest of inferences. That he had whispered counsel to her on long nights when Jack Ward did not come home, perhaps even the odd “I-told-you-so,” was also a good bet. I doubt Mrs. Ward ever looked at her husband without imagining her father standing there beside him for the purposes of comparison.
    And when Jack Ward had died, the ultimate I-told-you-so, Mrs. Ward had meekly returned to her father and begun to formulate her plan to offer him to the community. He had helped her through a bad marriage, saved her life by providing such a stern model of upright behavior. She began to see that it was wrong to keep such a man for her own private use when the entire community was in such dire need of a paradigm, an example of rectitude beyond reproach. Mohawk, Mrs. Ward explained to me, was a town that had lost its pride, its sense of self-worth, its recollections of its own pioneer history. The hearty men and women who had driven the savage Iroquois north and west, built long roads through the dark forest, erected churches and established settlements, had not