Free Within a Man's Heart by Tom Winton

but as I stood in the shade of a tall elm, it was cool and comfortable for late June. I didn’t have to look at the building before me for very long before realizing it had once been somebody’s home. It was two-stories high but yet a tiny thing. The white horizontal boards that made up the front wall couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet wide from end to end. Three steps up there was a wooden door and on each side of it, one rectangular window. Above the entryway, a third window had been squeezed between the structure’s sharp-sloping roof. As I stepped up the walkway toward the door, I couldn’t help but wonder how much smaller people might have been back when the place had been built.
    “Well, hello, new neighbor!” Carla Francis the librarian said, as I closed the door behind me and a string of bells tacked to it jingled.
    “Hello, Carla!” I said after working hard to recall her name, “How are you today?”
    “Just peachy,” she said rising from her desk alongside a narrow staircase. “I’ve been wondering if you’d be stopping in. I didn’t know if you were a reader or not.”
    “Yes, I am as a matter of fact” I said, approaching the bespectacled, middle-aged lady      with a yellow pencil wedged atop one ear.  “Say, this really is a cute little library! It even smells like books in here.”
    “Ouuu, I’m going to like you. I can tell already.”
    After exchanging smiles, I told her I wanted to look around a bit; then get a library card.
    “Sure!” she said, first pointing to the left and then to the right, “I keep fiction A to M on that wall and all nonfiction on that one. Upstairs,” she said, turning toward the staircase alongside us, “is where the N trough Z fiction is.”
    “Terrific! I think I’ll go upstairs and have a look around, if you don’t mind.”
    “Of course, you go right ahead. If you need me, I’ll be right here, entering these new books into the computer.”
    “Sounds good,” I said, a s I stepped over to the stairs.
    “Now you be careful going up there,” she said, as I took the first squeaky step. “You’re kind of tall, and the ceiling’s a bit low over those stairs.”
    “Sure thing, Carla. Thanks much.”
    The upstairs was just an unfinished attic, with a bookshelf running its short length on each side. The bare wooden roof beams were low up there, too, and they angled down sharply. So I wouldn’t hit my head, I had to walk down the center, directly beneath the roof’s ridge. But I wasn’t up there very long before finding what I hoped the little library would have. Thinking it would give me a better feel for the New England wilderness; I stooped down to a low shelf and pulled out a worn copy of Thoreau’s The Maine Woods . With that in hand, I went back downstairs to get my new library card.
    As Carla typed my information into her computer , she told me that the library was originally the home of an illiterate carpenter named Franklin Singleton. He’d built the place way back in 1849, and when he died an old man in 1898, he left an interesting stipulation in his will. He bequeathed the house to his heirs but offered to rent it indefinitely to the village of Moose Step—as long as they turned it into a library and kept it as such. He wanted to give the townsfolk, particularly the children, an opportunity to read because he himself never learned how to. The rent he requested was just a dollar a month. And it could never be raised.
    When Carla finished telling me about all that , she checked my book out, handed me a new library card, and I heard those bells ring from behind me. Another library patron had stepped inside, and as I put the card into my wallet, Carla peeked around me saying, “Well hello there, Gina!”
    Oh no , I thought, as I stuffed the wallet into the back pocket of my new Levis and she approached from behind. She would have to walk in here right now—while I’m here!
    As I turned to leave , she said, “Hi Carla!”