Terry Barr

---

Keeper


I’m riding in a car with a man I don’t know well. I don’t know why I agreed to him driving us out into the countryside, to a bookstore he claimed was owned and run by some old couple who might not know what they’re sitting on. He talks loudly for two reasons.

One, he can’t hear well and though he usually relies on reading lips, he can’t because we’re driving and he’s facing forward and I’m trying not to scream.

The second reason is why I’m trying not to scream, or at least the reason I understood then. It’s hot today, mainly because it’s late June in South Carolina. I don’t know why he won’t run the air conditioner, and I’m too polite to suggest it. It’s his car, his suggested journey, and I’m nevertheless hopeful of finding some neglected first edition of a Faulkner novel. Yes, I’m that obsessed.

I don’t know why our front windows are rolled up and the back windows rolled down.

I don’t know why having the back windows down and the front rolled up when you’re doing 65 on an interstate causes the roar that it does — an echoing sonic distress that reaches into the place I call my soul and does it damage I’m not sure will heal anytime soon.

The other thing I don’t know is why the guy driving can’t hear this. Or rather, I know why he can’t hear it, but I don’t know why he can’t feel it. Is he numb to experience, oblivious to others’ discomfort, pain, and the shame it sometimes takes to say out loud that something isn’t right, that what isn’t right is really disturbing me but apparently, not you? He keeps talking, and now I’m the one who can’t hear. Why do I put up with what I don’t like? Why am I trapped in a place I don’t want to be just because someone has told me about a book that I don’t even know that I’ll find?



When he veers off the interstate, my near-hysteria calms, but only because the sound behind me has waned a bit. We’re driving on a country road now, doing maybe 25 or 30. And though I’ve wondered about it, there is a place up ahead — what looks to be an antebellum white house with columns and behind it, a shed or a barn, or a barn and an abandoned garage. This long ago, I just don’t know, but a barn seems right. I won’t go in it yet, because we save barns for last in our journeys. They keep certain secrets.

We ring the front doorbell, and as one, the couple opens the door and invites us in. We don’t have to tell them what we’re here for because they know. They’ve done this before. Surely we speak, and I’m trying to gauge what his man and this woman must be thinking about us, about what we’ll buy and what they might charge us.

They’re just on the other side of gracious, formally polite, but colder than that. I think we tell them that we’re from the college, and maybe that helps, but they don’t smile or make any semblance of acknowledging that our worlds could be similar. They make sweeping gestures and that’s right.

All over the front three rooms and even down the long hallway that falls by the staircase are books. I pull one or two out, and they have prices in the front inside just like all the vintage and antique book stores I’ve visited. I know in an instant that the couple knows what they have, and even then, they know that I won’t be able to afford what it is they’re hoarding and hoping to do with these treasures.

I don’t find any Faulkner on these shelves, but I do see this book: My Brother’s Keeper, by Stanislaus Joyce, brother of James. It’s rare, and it’s a first edition, and other than some slight tearing and discoloration on the back dust cover, it’s in very fine shape. They’re asking $45 for it.

The price and the edition are marked in pencil, a temporary ransom?

I have $60 on me. And I also love James Joyce. Is his brother a good writer? Will I learn anymore about their lives than I already know from reading those mammoth novels and bios of a man who couldn’t see well, but well enough to create an entire world in a day, and an entire dreamscape in a night?

“Is this price fixed?” I ask.

“Yes.” And nothing else.

I have to have it, so I put it aside to hold. I keep thinking about the barn, and they say, “Oh yes, there are books back there, though they might be moldy.”

The barn has a dirt floor and smells like the unfinished basement of my childhood friend Steve’s house. If possible, there are even more books out here, and I have so many questions. Where did they all come from? Why are they dying out here? And what is this couple, who are surely gonna die in the next five years, thinking they’ll do with whatever dollars they squeeze out of me?

The man who drove me here hasn’t said much of anything since we got out of his car, and he’s barely looking at the books. In fact, as I finally notice, he’s watching me look more than he’s doing anything else. I don’t enjoy having people watch me as I look for books. It feels like they want to take whatever my soul sees straight out of me as I see it: the joy, the wonder, the hope.

I think this over, but then I see a first edition of The Skeleton’s Key to Finnegans Wake. It is not in such great condition, but the price is $5.00, and I’d lie awake for weeks and years if I didn’t buy it. If I or anyone else believes that reading this book will open up the land of archetypes and misfit dreamers, then we’re all crazy or affected by something deeper than the collector’s nature.

I don’t know what else there is in this barn on the maybe five acres of shaded property in this part of the state that I’ve never seen before and don’t plan on seeing again. I can’t take it because I can’t take all the books I want to rescue. I have to leave the barn before I want to, and I wonder still to this day about what I left behind, though I’ll never know about it all.

I’ll also never read My Brother’s Keeper, but that’s truly my problem alone.

I pull out fifty dollars and hand it over to the dried palm of the old man. He doesn’t thank me or remark at all on what I’ve purchased from him.

The man who drove me climbs back into the driver’s seat, and with my precious books, I get in too, knowing that the furious sound I came with will follow behind me for the forty-mile drive back.

And here’s the thing.

I have never gone back to this place though I’ve taught about barns in American culture and though I think about this one five or six times every year. Maybe someone else owns it and maybe those books are still sitting there, in worse shape than ever. I’ve searched online and it’s not there, if an online search means anything. I doubt I would go even if I found it.

I wouldn’t go because of the other thing — the man who took me there. It took many years before I heard him clearly, before I knew what he was. Those feelings we get when something behind us creeps too close or inserts itself into us — we know before we know. What follows us really can hurt us.

What we leave behind, what we don’t understand or think is just someone else’s negligence or ignorance might have been intentional all along. People can harm you without ever touching you. And I was blinded to a truth about this man and the least of it was that I thought he didn’t mean it on that day when he left the windows down and when he watched me looking over those books. He didn’t get me then.

But later, when he thought neither I nor anyone else heard him or saw him or even felt him, he did more. He was a keeper, all right. And what he kept, invisible ink on the souls of all his prey, can never be erased.

---

---

Banner Art:
from Ends of Barns, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1922