The Choir Book

When he grew tired, Jeremiah shut the choir book. It wasn’t just any choir book. It had been crafted in Italy during the 1400s and brought over by ancient Franciscans. Dust didn’t rise up from the book either, when Jeremiah shut it. It was too tidy for that. With no gloves, mind you, he’d been flipping the book’s vast pages for weeks, studying their bright calligraphy and the places where the book had been stitched up, both at the time of its creation and in the modern era before it had fallen under the more-proper care of Jeremiah’s rare books collection. It was too hovered-over to collect any dust.

Whenever someone would come look at the book (and the damn thing’s pages were the size of a refrigerator door’s), Jeremiah would explain its great size. A group leading some of the earliest Catholic worship services in America in the old days would gather around the great book and lead their congregations in Latin song. “It’s made from sheepskin,” Jeremiah would usually confirm to visitors in his spiel. “This side you’d call the hair side,” then flipping a page over, “This one, the flesh side.” People wouldn’t ask much, just if they could touch it. The book had a whole room to itself. And, although large, it wasn’t in immaculate shape.

It was a real book, though. It had not always been a treasure. It’d become one. Like where there were large, bright letter C’s, for example. In some of them, if you looked close, there was a little man’s face drawn into the C. With a big nose or what have you. In the 15 or 1600s, let’s say, some old guy, who probably bathed twice a year, thought, God, I’m bored in this place, I’ll doodle a while. What was the book doing out here in western New York? A long way from even Rochester, Erie or Buffalo. Jeremiah wondered the same thing about himself sometimes. If he didn’t fall off the map as he had, would he exist? Would he have lived to be so damn old? And, mostly, would he still be forgotten?