But Moon is a mechanic and Grayson is an artist. They coexist perfectly, perhaps the only friends in history—to hear Moon tell it—who never had a disparaging word between them. Moon does worry, especially in the beginning, that Grayson is chasing an impossible dream. Nobody ever made money doing small-press books. Put that in caps and say it again. NObody. If you can do it for twenty-five years and not lose your pants, you can call yourself blessed. Grayson never made a dime. His entire operation was bankrolled with family money. Eventually the boys came into hundreds of acres of prime Georgia planting land—peaches, corn, just about anything a man wanted to grow. But Darryl and Richard Grayson were not farmers. They sold the land and Grayson took his half and did what he did with it. His books made enough to keep most of his principal intact, and that’s all they ever made in his lifetime.
What is it about the book business anyway, Moon wonders. Sometimes it seems like nobody on any level of it makes any money. Maybe if you’re Random House and you can figure out how to publish nobody but James A. Michener, you can make a little money. Everybody else picks up peanuts.
Why do they do it? he wonders. But he knows why.
Now it’s 1963 and Rigby arrives, joining Grayson in the quest for the perfect book. Look at you, Darryl , Moon says over beer in the town bar, you’re launching a life . Grayson just nods in his cups. What has never been said—what Moon tells Trish Aandahl years after Grayson’s death—is how much influence Rigby had on Grayson. Rigby was truly remarkable for a kid: damn, he had the greatest hands , Moon says, he’da been a great doctor, delivering babies, coaxing ‘em into the world…he could coax butter out of a witch’s heart and his instincts for binding and design were almost as fine and fully formed as Grayson’s. Rigby offers his opinions timidly at first—a kid does not come in and tell a genius how to run his business— but he soon learns that Grayson has no ego in the heat of the work. Grayson will listen to the man in the moon if the guy can give him an idea, and Gaston Rigby is a fountain of ideas. Do you think, Darryl, that the center of the page is too dense?…Not by much, maybe, but listen to what the words are saying and look at it again . Grayson studies it. He walks away and looks from afar. More often than not, he decides that Rigby is right. Their talk runs nonstop through the day, every word germane to the work at hand. There is never a joke between them or a comment on the outside world or a reflection on womanhood. There are no calendar-girl pinups, no radios or newspapers, nothing that would take away Grayson’s concentration even for a moment. There are no clocks. Grayson comes down to the shop in the morning and Rigby is already there. They work until some inner clock tells Grayson that the day is done. In Grayson’s shop, time stands still. He alone knows when the work is through and he walks away, leaving Rigby to wash the press and tidy up the workbench and put everything back where it goes.
Rigby’s responsibilities grow along with his salary. By his second year he seems indispensable. His eye is uncanny: he catches things that might even escape the master in various stages of trial and error. Broken serifs, hairline cracks, typos: he spots them instantly. He checks each impression for indentation, uniformity of punch, blackness of ink (“needs a little more color here, Darryl”). His eye is so good that Grayson comes to depend on him in those final stages when the books are inspected and shipped. This gives him a sense of family, something he’s never known. Rigby lives upstairs, in the loft over the shop. He stands in darkness now, staring off through the black woods at the lights of the big house. He knows that sometimes the brother brings whores over from Seattle, but this too he sees as part of the process. If Grayson can be relaxed and made ready for tomorrow by the services of a whore, let him do it. They come and go, harmless fluff. Only near the end does the one called Nola Jean take on a major negative importance. She screws with Grayson’s head and is not good.
It is now 1968. Rigby is twenty-two. He has been with Grayson five years and life is sweet. He has a woman of his own, a relationship nurtured slowly like a courtship from another time. This is Crystal, Moon’s teenage niece, who ran away from her home in Georgia and now finds work in the North Bend bakery. Crystal loves Rigby’s shyness, his brilliance, his teddy-bear presence. He is the first solid man in her life, always the young gentleman. Rigby has none of the stormy impatience that runs rampant through his generation. Politics bores him: even the Kennedy assassination, he tells her, struck him as little more than another TV show. Crystal marvels at this. She is seventeen, and in love.
31
I reread the last chapter, which told of the fire. The facts rolled out like an epilogue. On the night of October 14, 1969, the shop had caught fire and gone up like a torch. A fire investigator had come out from Seattle, poking through the ashes for days before calling it, officially, an accident. But I knew from my own experience that these things are often vague. At least one hundred thousand fires a year are written off to unknown causes, Aandahl pointed out, and the presumption in law is that these are accidents. Arson must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt: a fireman’s suspicion, however strong, doesn’t cut it. An old-fashioned printshop like Grayson’s was a firebomb waiting to go off.
In the first place, there is paper everywhere. There are rags, often soaked with solvents or ink. The printer must work with fine papers and keep them in pristine condition, but he also works with ink, which gets on his hands, under his fingernails, and on his tools. Everything must be washed, many times a day. A working printer might go through 150 gallons of solvents a year. Kerosene was the stuff of choice for many shops. Grayson liked gasoline because it was harder and faster. He kept it in a fifty-gallon drum behind the shop. The drum sat upright in a wooden frame, with a spigot at the bottom where the squirt guns could be filled.
The fire broke out in the main part of the shop— the fire investigator was able to figure that out by the pattern of the wood charring. It had quickly consumed that room, spread up to the loft, then to the little storeroom in back. By the time it was seen from the road, flames had broken through the ceiling and back wall. The gas drum caught on fire and exploded, sending a fireball a hundred feet in the air. The remains of Richard Grayson were found in the shop: he had been drinking and had apparently passed out in a chair. His brother was in the back room. He too was drunk, and the fireman theorized that he had gone back to lie down on a cot that was kept there for just that purpose, when he’d had too much booze to walk himself back up the dark path to the main house.
Gaston Rigby had gone to town. It was for him a rare night out. He had taken his girl, Crystal, to dinner in Seattle and arrived home at midnight to find his world in ruins.
I was standing at the door when the library opened. It didn’t take long to dope out Rodney Scofield. I looked through periodical and newspaper indexes, and in half an hour I had come up with all the applicable buzzwords.
Oilman…manufacturer…eccentric…
Billionaire, with a b .
Recluse. Twenty years ago, when Scofield was in his late forties, he had taken a page from Howard Hughes and disappeared from the public eye. He had been written about but seldom seen since 1970. His business deals were conducted and closed by the battalion of toadies and grunts who worked for him. Nowhere in the general press was his hobby, books, given a line.
I went to AB/Bookman’s Weekly , which publishes its own yearly index.
I found nothing on Scofield, but Leith Kenney was prominent in the magazine’s index of advertisers. He had been a bookseller, with a store in San Francisco.