There is a library in the Captain’s house. At least there is a room called the library, although what fills its shelves are not books. Lamps, clay jugs, jars of seed, jars of oil. Charcoal sketches. Goblets, yarn, a tub of nails. A spyglass. A tin nose. Turpentine. A weasel skull, dainty as lace. I like pretending the objects are a kind of book. That they can be read. I like making up stories about them. Where they came from, whose hands used them, where they might be headed next.
Once I found an object that was a mystery to me. A metal contraption with pieces both curved and straight. I asked the caretaker what it was.
“Sextant.”
“What’s it for?”
“Navigation.”
“How’s it work?”
“Mirrors.”
“Mirrors! How?”
He said it was a sailing thing. It was the most I ever heard the caretaker say. He said sailors used it to measure the angle between the horizon and a celestial body so they could figure out where they were going.
“What do you mean, ‘celestial body’?”
“Sun, moon, stars. Whatever’s there. Doesn’t even have to be there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Could be light from a star that expired long ago.”
I gave up trying to understand.
There’s another metal contraption in the library I like better. The magic lantern. It, too, uses a mirror, and I no more understand how it works than I do the sextant, but at least I understand what it does, which is to make marvels appear before your eyes: ships, cities, lavish sweets, horned sea creatures, winged fairies. It uses painted slides, rectangular slips of glass no bigger than the mirror glued to the Captain’s little leather book. When you put one in the magic lantern, the image comes out upon the library wall, only it looks real, all lit up and big as life. Some nights, after dark, we have a picture show. We put in different slides and make up stories for what we see.
Usually something goes wrong. The slide jams, or the curved mirror behind the lamp slips, forcing an intermission. While someone—if not the caretaker, then someone else who happens to be handy—works to set it right, the Captain entertains us by making shadow puppets with his hands. He can do a hawk flying, a rooster crowing, a tree growing, an angel riding a donkey, a man smoking a cigar. In truth, I like this even better than the magic lantern show, with its intricate and colorful but fixed images.
The Captain taught me how to make shadow puppets with my hands, too. I am not as good as he is, but I can manage a few things: a butterfly, a boat, a rabbit. One time we performed together. People in the audience took turns calling out parts of a story. For a while we let their words determine the movements of our hands. Then—the Captain signaling to me with a rare wink, an even rarer grin—we turned disobedient and did as we felt.