The Original Opening to Hiram Falls

For several years, this was the opening to my novel; then two editors suggested I take a different tack. I agreed. But I still like this one.

(It has been a minute since I last posted something about ‘Hiram Falls,’ my novel. It still rests on 10 publishers awaiting them to read and decide. I may just self-publish. Regardless, this opening was changed largely because the story had grown much broader. However, I still like it, even though it takes you into only two of the book’s storylines.)

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It is the darkest part of the night, the time just before dawn. Hiram Falls is bone-deep cold. The wind swirls the falling snow up and down the street. Tiny twisters. Several street lamps flicker.

No one is about. Except for a man who glides more than walks, his feet leaving no impressions, no sign, as if he were the wind itself. He is tall and lean and wears a long, black oilskin coat open in the front, fluttering with his movement. He is wearing laceless leather boots that come nearly to his knees. He has no gloves but shows no sign of needing them.

He has wandered from a cave on the backside of Mt. Riga; has come down the mountain, across Upper Bridge to the shops of the lower village. He is settled now in front of Fiengo’s Curios, the wind gently waving his coat as he stares at the box marked “Free Books.”

Old Man Fiengo has been filling this box for years. It makes no sense, he knows, to give away for free what he had been trying to sell for a dime or a quarter or even one dollar. He did it first as a gimmick, as a way to draw people into his shop, but when the free books disappeared he got it in his mind that someone or some ones who couldn’t afford to buy them were reading them. It made Old Man Fiengo happy.

What Old Man Fiengo doesn’t know, and will never know even when, suddenly, his free books stop disappearing, is that it is this man and an older woman who take most of his free books. The man knows. He has remembered seeing the woman drop something into the box the other morning. He doesn’t remember when.

The man stands under the awning. The man who didn’t used to read, doesn’t remember whether he ever could, only knows now that he now can and hungers for the knowledge that comes from the words on the page.

The man has been all through the library, read hundreds of books in all the shelves — the books on science first, then novels and books of poetry, histories, books on mathematics and religion and gardening and animals, romance and humor and tragedy.

The man stands before Old Man Fiengo’s Free Book box with snow collecting on the shoulders of his coat now absorbs more than reads, finishes a book in the time it takes him to turn the pages, much like swimming with the minnows in Riga Creek or flying with the starlings at spring time, darting in and out of the aspens and birches and pines.

Nothing that he reads, though, brings him closer to knowing who he is and why he is there, standing in the silence of the snowfall in the bitter cold that he does not feel.

Under the streetlights’ dim illumination, the man lifts the cover on the wooden box resting on the table under the awning in front of the store. There, at the top, is a small book bound in leather, wrapped tightly with a leather strand tied in a careful knot. It is a handmade book.

He unwraps the leather string, opens the book, and tries to make out the lettering. It is called script, but he does not know that. For several minutes he tries to understand the letters, the words. Finally he makes it out, “January 1, 1918. 4 degrees. Cloudy …” He knows it will take him time to decipher this book. He carefully closes it, wraps the leather string around it and tucks it in his pocket as he closes the box softly. He drifts away in the wind.

No one sees him.