The next morning I got up, got dressed, took a flashlight and my reading glasses out to Lloyds Free Little Library box, and knelt down and shined the light on the little brass plate he screwed to the bottom in 2004, the one nobody ever bends far enough to read, and what it pointed me to stopped the whole bus depot cold.
The plate was engraved with a date and a book and page number, a county recording number, and under it, in Lloyds neat shop-teacher letters, it said, ask the courthouse before you ask my widow.
I took that number to the county the next day, and the clerk pulled the record, and the superintendent with his lanyard learned that the corner of Elm and Fourth was never simply going to be his.
My husband, who taught shop across that street for thirty-three years, had donated a permanent public easement over our corner in 2004, dedicating the strip along the sidewalk to the neighborhood in perpetuity for the little library and the children who use it, recorded at the county, running with the land forever.
Lloyd knew that a busy corner across from a school would tempt somebody someday. So he tied it up. The easement means the frontage cannot be closed off, paved into a depot entrance, or fenced from the public, no matter who owns the lot, and the districts whole plan depended on that frontage for the bus turn-in the state had already approved.
Without our corner, their depot has nowhere to put its gate. I was not the only thing between them and their back lot. I was holding the one strip their engineers could not design around, and Lloyd had recorded it twenty years before the superintendent ever knocked.
When the man came back, I did not argue. I handed him the certified copy from the courthouse and I said, my husband gave this corner to the neighborhood in 2004. Its public, recorded, permanent. You cannot take what the public already holds an easement on. Youll have to find another spot for your buses. And leave my library box be.
He read it in his car a long while. Then he drove off, and the district found another parcel two blocks down, and the corner of Elm and Fourth stayed exactly as Lloyd built it.
Living alone at my age isnt safe, he had told me. What is not safe is a school man who thinks a widow wont read the bottom of her own husbands library box. I stock it every Saturday still. Every kid in the neighborhood borrows from it. Lloyd built that box to give books to children, and he protected the ground under it so that no board could ever cart it away. All I had to do was kneel down and read what he left me.