MEETING LEONARD

Charlie Hucker’s life changed forever starting at two o’clock on a hot Sunday afternoon as he left the town’s red-brick library and went to find his brother.

John-Dan’s Chevvy was parked nearby in the shade of tall oaks. Charlie ambled over and propped his sunburned forearms on the open passenger windowsill.

“I’m ready to roll.”

In the back seat, John-Dan and pony-tailed Janey uncoiled, clothes askew and faces red. Mortified, Charlie reared back.

“Dammit, can’t you hang somewhere for a bit?” his brother said.

Nineteen-year-old John-Dan always seemed to draw the women with his crooked-tooth smile. Charlie, two years younger, dropped his eyes when a female looked his way.

He plodded down the street.

A chubby kid in a striped t-shirt was slouched beside a lemonade stand in front of a fenced lot.

Charlie bought a lukewarm cupful of the tart drink to collect his thoughts.

The kid thumbed through a ripped comic. Charlie had never had the money to buy them. His folks felt such material was only fit to light the wood stove.

Seeing him eye the spread of black and white images, the boy slapped the pages shut.

A sign on the chain-link fence said, Community Yard Sale. Charlie tossed his paper cup and strolled inside.

The setup looked like a larger-scale version of what his parish would promote as a rummage sale.

He wandered through racks of fusty clothing, arrangements of chipped furniture, piles of dull kitchenware, and sagging boxes labelled $3 Grab-All.

Several middle-aged women, each sporting a floppy straw hat with a gaudy plastic rose, were strategically placed amidst the crowd to ring up sales.

Charlie noted a lamp with a Roy Rogers cowboy-themed shade. He passed a lurid display of red hurricane glass that looked like pieces from his grandma’s kitchen. Hefting a cross-cut saw with missing teeth, he wondered what sorry handyman would buy it.

After making a full circuit of the offerings, he stopped in the shade of a tall beech in a corner of the yard.

A couple of old men leaned on either side of the trunk, smoking sloppy hand-rolls. Charlie nodded at them, wiped his forehead on his upper arm.

It’d be a dammed sight cooler back at the library.

But the county had opened it today just for Charlie and several other guys to take a technical test administered by the county clerk. Those who passed would be given a certificate to repair heavy vehicles.

Charlie’s Pa had made up his mind that mechanization was changing the world he’d been raised in. “More money’s made now with that little paper then our crops bring in.”

Pa had pronounced the word as pepper, but his tone invited neither humor nor discussion. Both his sons had now graduated high school; he saw no need for further book learning.

That included studying for today’s test. John-Dan had already done that to get his own certification and had mentored Charlie for several months.

“John-Dan trained you good,” Pa had said that morning as he saw the boys off.

Charlie hadn’t argued with his father about the certification. Nor had he contemplated going to college. His people didn’t do that; they were wheat farmers.

But farm life and fan belts had no appeal for Charlie. Nor did finding a Janey of his own. Another way of being in the world was tugging at him; one he couldn’t quite articulate, let alone discuss with his Pa.

*

Charlie had two secrets.

The first was from childhood: he loved to read. To the point that he’d lied to his parents about it.

Appreciation of the written word was not an acceptable occupation in the eyes of his Pa. He was a man who forbade anything but school books in the house and was as intransigent about that decision as the weevil beetles that plagued their crops.

A traditional head of the household. And a man who was illiterate.

Charlie got a clue about this one evening when his parents were doing the annual tax filing at the kitchen table.

Mother read the form and father did the arithmetic in his head and told her what numbers to put down.

When finished, she had taken the ink pen and signed her name with flourishes and looping swirls. Father had made an ‘X.’

Charlie had never paid attention to that before; now he asked why.

Pa had boxed his ear and sent him to bed. “I’ll take no lip from you!” he’d roared as his stricken son scrabbled up the stairs.

Later, Mother had come into Charlie’s room to whisper that some people, like Pa, found it hard to write. “His hands work best with an axe, not a pen.”

Days later, John-Dan had explained the truth to Charlie: Pa had been removed from school at age ten so he could work the land.

Charlie had sworn to secrecy. Still, he’d felt a crack in his view of the world and adults.

He continued to read outside of his school curriculum and well above his grade level but did it away from the farmhouse.

His teacher applauded this dedication, one she rarely saw in farm boys. She helped Charlie get a library card and suggested book titles to feed his growing appetite.

By the time he’d entered his teens, Charlie had grown out of Dickens, Zane Grey, and Jack London. He had devoured Wordsworth and Auden, Leacock and Layton, and was working his way through Tolstoy and other masterful writers.

They brought him into worlds and cultures filled with humour, arguments, and love affairs, survival techniques and existential despair.

He was both dazzled and befuddled. But his bookworming remained under wraps so as not to aggravate Pa.

The Tuesday he turned sixteen, Charlie went to the library at lunchtime. He picked out a small hardback written by E.M. Forster. Later, down by the creek on his farm, he opened the pages behind the book’s black dustjacket and met the student Maurice Hall.

Maurice took his breath away. This became his second secret: Charlie had long felt urges and longings about boys which he struggled to understand.

During Phys. Ed. class, he caught himself staring at the muscular frames of certain schoolmates. During threshing time on the farm, his eyes lingered on the sweaty, shirtless chests of some hired hands who came to help his family harvest the wheat.

Reading Maurice, Charlie wondered if his feelings for men were different from anyone else’s. He tried to figure out why John-Dan was so mesmerized about girls yet regaled his brother with smutty anecdotes about Janey.

Charlie puzzled about this difference until he couldn’t bear it. One weekday after school, as he and John-Dan were mucking the barn before supper, Charlie blurted his confusion.

John-Dan froze, then punched him with a hard fist and stormed out.

Charlie lay stunned, then stumbled to the creek to nurse his sore face. John-Dan didn’t reappear for the evening meal. Charlie told his parents the black eye was from a schoolyard tussle.

Before the week was over, Pa ordered Charlie to burn his library card. Then they visited the teacher. Pa demanded that Charlie read only the books that were mandatory for graduation.

“A man’s hands and honest work are his way to Heaven,” said Pa, “not ‘littature’ that rots his soul.”

Charlie knew John-Dan had betrayed him. The crack in his world was now a fissure. But he kept his head down, his inner confusions to himself.

*

Today, a year later, Charlie and John-Dan had driven into town an hour before the test time. One brother was eager to see the buxom Janey, the other to see the stacked library shelves.

The quiet reading room was filled with filtered sunlight beaming behind drawn shades. The aromas of old paper, ink, and leather bindings were seductive to Charlie.

He drifted up and down the rows of neatly labelled hardbacks, tantalized by the promises within their worn pages.

As he browsed, he’d take down a book that caught his eye, flip the pages gently, hold it in his chapped hands as if it were a fresh egg, then refile it.

After a while, he had to shove his hands in his pockets to keep them still.

Maybe I should get another library card. His stomach clenched at the idea.

What if the preacher could convince Pa. That man’s thundering sermons held their small rural congregation spellbound. Only someone who loved words could have written them; maybe he could persuade Pa the little black smudges on a page weren’t a threat.

Now someone at the rummage sale pushed by Charlie, bumping him out of this reverie.

His hip pressed into a table piled with tattered Life magazines and a jumble of hardbacks. The titles on some spines were cracked and illegible, but he recognized A Guide to Joinery and My Friend Flicka.

The face of a toothy young man grinned at him from the cover of a slim, unmarked book. Charlie picked it up.

Let Us Compare Mythologies / Leonard Cohen.

It opened on its own to page forty. A column of black text, titled Song, seemed to float up in Charlie’s face.

He read, My lover Peterson/He named me Goldenmouth—.

Charlie sucked in his breath. The skin on his arms prickled.

Flipping the pages, a line from another poem reached out …when your flesh is drenched with moon….

Crazy images filled his mind. An ache formed in his chest; he rubbed his breastbone.

He closed the book with sweaty hands and stared at the grubby cover. Leonard smiled back with half-closed eyes.

Charlie wondered how someone who looked as young as himself could string together words like that.

He leaned against the table, trying to control the sensations churning inside him.

“You gonna buy that?” The lemonade boy had come up beside him, scowling.

“Ah… okay.”

“A buck.”

Charlie handed him a precious fiver and got back three ones.

“You owe me one more,” he said.

The boy stuck out his lower lip and stepped back. “I don’t owe you nuthin’.”

Charlie tried to stare him down, but his mind wasn’t on it. The boy snickered and slipped away.

Charlie’s gut was throbbing. The book felt cool between his calloused palms. Eyes closed, he pressed it against his forehead, then slipped it inside his shirt against his sticky skin.

He traipsed toward the fence’s opening, slow-walked back to the Chevvy. John-Dan and Janey were cuddled in the front seat smoking Export A’s.

Charlie caught his brother’s eye and said, “I’m walking home.”

Without waiting for a response he turned, boots crunching on pea gravel as he headed toward the asphalt highway.

The walk home was only three miles. Today it would feel like a million.

He’d spend the night under Pa’s roof, then ask his teacher for help. Starting tomorrow, he would never live in any room of his father’s world again.

Karin Doucette is a published writer of short fiction and memoir, and a playwright. She has ranked in international story and stage play competitions and was a Finalist in UK's 2023 Page Turner Awards. Karin also reads for top story competitions, most recently, Scottish Arts Trust. She has travelled and/or worked on every continent and lives in her native Canada.